Ok, I get that English is a living language.
And I get that turning nouns into verbs (denominalization) is something that has gone on as long as English has been around.
Still, as someone who has spent tens of thousands of hours trying to master the language, some examples are simply irksome.
It’s not that I am completely against the practice, especially when it facilitates efficiency.
For example, we do not slide down the hill on skis; we ski. Similarly, the snowboard had hardly been invented before that brand new noun also became a verb. I find that perfectly acceptable.
In fact, the agility of English nouns to convert so easily, along with the simplicity of conjugation, are a couple of the great things about the language. There are literally hundreds of English words that are both noun and verb.
Many of them probably seemed very odd to people when they were first coined. For me, ‘boat’ is a good example. After all, we have the verbs sail, cruise, row and paddle etc., that are much more precise. I personally still find saying something like “I boated around the lake” very awkward and would make a different choice. It is, however, in common use and recognized by most dictionaries.
So, I guess I am a flexible purist because while I accept the practice, I think there should be limits.
The word that provided the impetus for this column is dialogue. As I said before, denominalization makes sense where efficiency is gained. Why on Earth, would someone say “we dialogued” when we have the perfectly good verb ‘to talk’?
Another new verb rapidly gaining acceptance that really irks is ‘to author.’ I don’t object to be called an author, but I don’t author for a living, I write for a living.
Cases like author feel really forced to me, like someone is trying to sound smart and failing. Perhaps they feel to author is more authoritative than to write?
Some of the most ridiculous examples come from the world of sport. Don’t you just want to track down the first person who co-opted the noun podium and smash one over his head? Again, this does not add efficiency and simply makes the speaker sound either ignorant or pretentious, perhaps both.
It gets even more cumbersome when people coin verbs from nouns that were derived from verbs in the first place. A great example is conference, as in “we conferenced.” A conference (noun) is, of course, a gathering where or in which people confer on a specific topic or topics.
I suppose I should learn to laugh about these things rather than cringe. English changes. Words go in and out of favour and sometimes even change meaning based on popular use. More so today than every with mass communication being what it is.
A great example is the noun paradigm. Originally, it was a scientific term that simply meant “a typical example or pattern of something.”
In 1962, the American physicist Thomas Kuhn used a much broader interpretation suggesting “a framework of concepts, results, and procedures within which subsequent work is structured” in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
In so doing, he coined the phrase “paradigm shift.” Examples include the transition between Newtonian mechanical physics and Einsteinian relativistic physics.
During the 1990s tech boom ‘paradigm shift’ became one of the most abused and overused buzzwords of the decade taking on the meaning of a radical change in thought patterns, personal beliefs or complex systems or organizations; and/or replacing a former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different one.
It is not as popular as it once was, but you still do see it come up, particularly in marketing-speak. I have yet to see anyone use it as a verb, but mark my words, some day you will hear someone say, or see someone write: “we are paradigming our processes.”
That instance does not count, by the way. I will be livid if I got credited for coining paradigm as a verb.
