Comments on: Verbing Nouns

By: Winnie

Winnie — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:13:18 +0000

I heard that in German ‘verbing’ nouns is a common feature. In English, this is, I think, an expression of the fact that it is a (West) Germanic language.

By: Cathy Drexler

Cathy Drexler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:34:54 +0000

I spend a lot of time around medical people, and educators, and, worst, medical-educators. I am “growing” a hatred for nouning of verbs.

Some nursing pearls: “toileting” or “bath-ing” (“a” with short-sound, not to be confused with “long-a” bathing, which actually exists) a patient, instead of helping a patient with a trip to the toilet or a bath. If they want to really go for worst-use jargon, they can use “client” instead of “patient”, but that’s another rant.

And if we testing how well a new drug/device performs, “we” now say that we’re “trialing” the drug/device. When I hear this word, I automatically discount everything else that comes out of the speaker’s mouth !

By: Cliff Hathcock

Cliff Hathcock — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:01:26 +0000

As Calvin expained to Hobbes, “Verbing wierds language.”

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:35:44 +0000

I loathe the use of “conversate” in the place of converse.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:42:38 +0000

Like Mandarin, English is an isolating, analytic language, and so one doesn’t need to make any morphological changes to a noun in order to turn it into a verb. One simply needs to change its position within a sentence; you’ll readily understand what I mean if I say that I cheese a pizza or shoe a child, and verbs so derived from nouns sometimes gain acceptance in standard written English. Such was the case with the word “access”, which used to be something one gained, not something one did.