More peeves
On "verbing" nouns
Naomi Angoff Chedd, of Brookline, Mass., writes: “Here’s what drives me crazy: the ‘verbing’ of the English language. It started, I think, with using impact as a verb, rather than saying making an impact. (I despise the word impactful too. Save that for another time.) But fine — I’ll let that go. Rich people talk about summering and wintering in different places, and I can also let that go, although I don’t like it. Now, though, there are many words that are verbed that shouldn’t be. Here’s a conversation I overheard at an event (at a bookstore!) not long ago:
“Woman #1: Oh, that top is so cute!
Woman #2: Thank you! I thrifted it.
Woman #1: I thrifted this (pointing to her scarf).
Woman # 2: Where do you thrift?
Woman #1: At (unintelligible). There are so many great places to thrift around here!
Woman #2: Text me! We’ll thrift this weekend!
“One of my colleagues asked, “Can we dialogue about that at our next meeting?” I said we could talk about it.
“Even friend, as in ‘I’ll friend you on Facebook,’ is uncomfortable. So is ‘Good idea. Let’s bucket that.’
“Granted, sometimes verbing can be fun or funny, or even singularly meaningful. Remember when John Kerry was swiftboated? That describes a specific, very deceitful way of ruining one person’s reputation. And around here, we know exactly what people mean they say, ‘That big U-Haul got storrowed,’ although the rest of the country does not.
“Anyway, these are things I think about when I can’t sleep.”
Naomi, I used to have a cat, and whenever I brought something new into the house and put it where she’d see it — say, a brightly colored throw pillow on the sofa — she’d freeze when she entered the room and observe it closely until she was sure it was unthreatening. I’m a bit that way myself, and I suspect most of us animals have such a trip wire in our brains. Maybe a psychology grad student could get a grant for researching this.
But back to humans and language. “Verbing” nouns can’t have started with the verb impact, because impact was a verb before it was a noun, from about 1600 on, and it was an adjective even before that, though the adjectival use died out around 1650.
My recollection is that usage-conscious folk considered using contact as a verb verboten before it caught on to hate on the verb impact. Merriam-Webster does note that some people feel the verb impact is “problematic,” though it has no problem with contact. In fact, it’s downright snarky toward those who object to the latter, noting: “The use of contact as a verb, especially in sense 2b [‘to get in communication with’], is accepted as standard by almost all commentators except those who write college handbooks.”
Hey, Merriam-Webster, I’m a writer of a college handbook! And just now I’m in the middle of explaining that as the methods of communication available to us have proliferated — mail, phone, fax, email, messaging, Skype, etc. — contact has become an extremely useful verb, even though reach out (which trips my wire) is probably more popular now.
Where I’m going with this is to hark back to my previous Peeves post, in which I reported that an eminent linguistics professor has compiled a list of common reasons for disliking a word or phrase, and one of them is that the word is “felt to be” trendy.
The verb thrift is an excellent case in point. Buying used clothes is trendy now. And surely that’s a good thing: It’s less wasteful and more sustainable than everyone buying everything new and throwing old stuff away.
But if I were the marketing manager for a used-clothes reseller, the idea of encouraging our customers to boast that what they’re wearing is secondhand would give me hives. “It’s vintage!” is respectable, but most of the used clothes for sale are of quite recent vintage, so that’s not an accurate descriptor. Hence whoever came up with thrift as a verb deserves a Nobel Prize for Marketing, it seems to me.
However, trends don’t last. (If they do, they stop being trends.) Either a word like thrift, verb, catches on and blends in or it falls out of use, possibly to fall back into use at some future time.
Naomi, the verbs you object to are all fairly recent — except dialogue, which is actually a few years older than impact. Try thinking of your dislike as adaptive (which word I never used to see either; it means “relating to, or being a heritable trait that serves a specific function and improves an organism's fitness or survival”). As in, we’re probably as naturally suspicious of old words in new senses as my cat was of new throw pillows. Either the suspicion or the neologism will fade away.
While my hypothetical graduate student is researching neophobia, how about if I look for a hypothetical bookie to take bets on which new verbs will be long-lived and which will not. I’m betting that friend will be with us at least as long as Facebook survives, but I don’t know about thrift. Maybe finding a less self-congratulatory replacement for it is a job for my “May I Have a Word” column in the Globe.
Please do send me your language peeves, puzzles, problems, and questions at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
You mentioned the singular they.
...
This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing.[9][10] However, by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]
Oh, Ms. Wallraff, this is really a non-problem.
It is an evolution in language that creates efficiency. For example, my wife and I take a small amount of a noni supplement every day (it is a tropical fruit, if you were not familiar). So, she often says to me: “Did you noni today?”
We use may such concepts. How about “I pilled the dog” meaning, I gave her the meds.
Even older, “I papered the walls today” meaning, I applied wallpaper. It could also be "I papered the town today" meaning I spread leaflets everywhere.
I could go on and on.
That reader might be peeved, but she is fighting a hopeless battle.
Jeff Kaufman
Needham