All of us have language pet peeves. Some people hate double negatives, others go bonkers when they hear someone end a sentence with a preposition, many feel slang is a sign of end times, etc. More than a few people cringe, groan or become tempted to resort to violence when they hear verbing, i.e., turning non-verbs into verbs. Done wrong, verbing is the epitome of corporate culture, bureaucracy and needlessly convoluted language. Done well, however, verbing can fill a valuable and necessary niche in our language and provide nuance and meaning that would otherwise be difficult to capture or lost.
Examples of (bad) verbing:
We incentivize good employee performance.
Let’s action the top three ideas items immediately and table the rest.
We need to showcase our strengths.
We should brainstorm some ideas and dialogue about what each group came up with.
Let’s on-board the new employees.
So, yes, verbing can be pretty awful.
While we may say we dislike or even hate verbing, we change nouns and adjectives into verbs all the time.
It is one of the great strengths of English that we can fluidly change nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, nouns and verbs to adjectives and adjectives into nouns and verbs. When we host a party, parent a child, contact a friend, highlight a passage, greenlight a project, diagnose a disease, critique an idea, mastermind a plan, elbow a path, shoulder blame, strong-arm someone, pencil something in, eye someone up and down, card someone at a bar, seat a patron at a restaurant, bogey or par in golf, ski or skate, access a file, divorce a spouse, salt our food, fool someone or oil a part, we are verbing.
Adjective verbing is everywhere as well: fabric can yellow, we can thin paint, dim the lights, perfect something, tame, style, wet or dry our hair, bare our souls. shy away, quiet down, mellow out, clean a room or complete a task.
Some of the more recent, and highly used, additions to English are the results of verbing: emailing, texting, posting, blogging, googling, favoriting, skyping, IMing/DMing, etc.
Verbing can result in highly descriptive and poetic sentences, particularly when the verbification results in a more compact, lyrical sentence than the more traditional language processes would allow.
For example:
I squirreled away the cookies to enjoy later.
She practically leap-frogged over everyone to get out the door at the end of work today.
He has worked from home for so long, that I was convinced that he had Howard Hughes-ed himself and I would find him wearing a garbage bag and sporting three-inch long fingernails.
We snailed down the road at rush hour this morning.
My phone was completely bricked after I dropped it into the toilet.
While Susan bubbled with excitement at the news, Stan frothed at the mouth with anger.
When it came time for me to introduce my husband to my coworkers, I completely blue-screened and forgot my boss’s name.
Many of the noun verbings are just hidden similes—I stowed away the cookies like a squirrel; we moved down the road at rush hour like snails; my phone was like a brick after I dropped it into the toilet, etc. Verbing the noun cuts out the unnecessary words and gives the sentences directness and a modern feel.
Why does English use verbing so much?
Unlike most other languages, English doesn’t use many inflections, and verbs don’t have special or separate endings. For example, in English the base word run can be used as a noun or verb and thus can be easily modified to fit the circumstances needed. In French, run can be course (n) or courir (v). Other examples are rain, which can be a noun or verb, but French uses pluie (n) and pluet (v), and English copy (n and v) versus copie (n) and copier (v).
Often, verbing a noun in English only takes the addition of a tense affix to change the noun to a verb, e.g., we went for a walk, we walked; it poured down rain, it rained cats and dogs; the host was known for hosting fabulous parties; the criminal mastermind masterminded the bank heist, etc., but many times we can discern the meaning with no change from the noun form:
Let’s breakfast at eight tomorrow morning.
My landlord wasn’t home, so I opted to mailbox my rent check.
After the last round of texts, I decided to ghost that guy I met at the bookstore.
Alternating Stress Patterns
In cases of zero-derivation conversion of a word (when there is no change in the word when it converts to a verb), there is sometimes a difference in how we say the word pairs to differentiate between the noun and the verb. In the verb forms, the stress is on the first syllable, while the stress is on the last syllable for nouns.
For example:
Remember to record (v) the meeting if you want to have it on record (n).
I can’t permit (v) you to camp here if you don’t have a permit (n).
The jury decided to convict (v) the former convict (n) of operating a fake clown school.
Verbing Proper Nouns
Verbification can also involve using proper nouns to create verbs, although the lasting impact of the new verb will depend entirely on the memorability of the individual, entity or event in question. Examples of this are gerrymandering, boycotting, xeroxing, bedazzling, supergluing and googling.
For example, it is much easier to say,
The district was gerrymandered to a ridiculous degree.
than say,
The district boundaries were manipulated to as to favor a particular political party to a ridiculous degree.
or
I googled Stamford’s new girlfriend and found out she is wanted in fourteen states for smuggling baby turtles.
vs.
I used an internet search engine to look up information about Stamford’s new girlfriend and found out she is wanted in fourteen states for smuggling baby turtles.
The strength of a proper noun verb will depend on the cultural and historical significance of the reference. Many people that know history would understand if I said someone had been Waterloo’d given its historical significance, but future generations might not understand someone getting Kanye’d or Bobbitted once the cultural reference is outdated or lost. If the individual, organization or event is recent, writers should also keep in mind that cultural memory and references can change dramatically, and your once-witty and timely reference may become lost, or, worse, take on a meaning you did not intend. For example, the verb hoovering used to mean vacuuming (based on the vacuum cleaner brand Hoover), but currently has taken on the meaning of being sucked back into a relationship through threats of self-harm or false accusations. Pretty big change to the meaning if you intended one and not the other.
The verbing of a brand name like xeroxing, googling or velcroing, seems like a great thing for the companies involved, given the immediate brand name recognition and widespread use. However, many brands that have become verbs, while enjoying the publicity that comes with being a dictionary entry, find out that their brand name can take on a generic quality and their own trademarks and brand recognition get weakened or lost. Do you always use a Xerox machine while xeroxing? Do you only use Adobe Photoshop when photoshopping an image? Do you ever use Internet Explorer or Bing when you google something? (The answer for the last question is, of course, no. No one ever uses IE or Bing.) When brands make unsuccessful attempts to verb their names, the results can be cringe-worthy. In 1996, Yahoo attempted to coin a new verb with the “Do You Yahoo?” campaign. Needless to say, yahooing never caught on.
Shakespeare and Verbing
William Shakespeare was a master of verbing, creating new verbs as he needed them by using existing words and altering them with affixes or changing their forms to fulfill specific needs in his text. Even though the words were new, audiences then and now intuitively understand their meaning through the root words’ meanings, context and affixes.
Shakespeare used the prefixes en– and em– to change nouns into verbs, such as with ensheltered, embayed, enwheel and encaved in Othello (2.1.17-18, 2.1.85-87, 4.1.80) and the following section in Richard II, which shows verbing via the en– affix, but also through adding the suffix –ed to the noun portcullis:
Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips… (1.3.160)
In addition, Shakespeare added verbings we still use: gossip, torture, numb, elbow, eyeball, gust, drug and far too many more to include in this list. He even used of friend as a verb in Hamlet:
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you. (1.5.186-187)
and Henry V:
Disorder, that hath spoil’d us, friend us now! (4.5.19)
Should you verb non-verbs?
Absolutely!
As you can see in the examples above, English is rife with verbs that started as something other than verbs. Think of how easy it is to say I toweled my hair dry, I texted my friends, her face reddened, etc., rather than find longer, and likely less exact, alternatives. Think of how easy it is to say, “I vacuumed the carpet,” than, “I used a vacuum cleaner to remove dirt and particles from the carpet,” or “We decided as a group to boycott the company,” instead of “We decided as a group to express our disapproval by refusing to have dealings with the company.” Where would we be without inching, bugging, blackening, dogging, heading, toeing, thundering, etc? Sure, we could probably express ourselves using other words, but if the verbed noun does the best job, why choose another way to say what we mean?
One of the beauties of English is its flexibility and ability to grow to meet whatever need may arise. Need to describe how someone bounded down a hallway?He kangaroo’d down the hallway. Did you lose your train of thought in the middle of a sentence? I completely 404’d in the middle of my sentence. Do you know someone clumsy? We practically bubblewrapped her before we went hiking, and she still came back injured. All we need is a little context, and we can make a meaningful sentence out of anything.
Yes, there are purists who claim to hate verbing, and point to examples like actioning, dialoguing, gifting and impacting as examples of the inexorable slide of English from language to jargon to slang to caveman grunts and pointing. However, if those purists were to cut out all verbs that had once been nouns or adjectives from their speech, they would find themselves hard–pressed to express themselves, and would soon find their language much less colorful, expressive and meaningful.
When tempted to use a noun– or adjective–turned verb, first ask yourself if there is an existing, better way to say or write your thought? Will your word choice help or hinder your reader or writer’s understanding of your words? We can all agree that incentivize is pretty awful, and provide incentives does the job as well without any of the bureaucratic baggage. Do you want your word choice to make sense with time? Perhaps the more bureaucratic–sounding verbing is the more acceptable choice for your audience, even if it sounds grating to outside ears. Verbing also lends a more casual feel to your writing, so more formal text needs more formal, less colorful word choices. Make the best choice for your writing, your tone and your meaning.
So, whether you are yo–yoing on verbing, stomaching verbing for the time being or feel that the right verbing can perfect your text, we can all agree that the creation of new verbs can help create writing that can be fresh, powerful, meaningful and, yes, beautiful.
Cohen, Noam. “The Power of the Brand as Verb.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 July 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/weekinreview/19cohen.html?_r=0.
Crystal, David. “Verbing: Shakespeare’s Linguistic Innovation.” The British Library, The British Library, 18 Feb. 2016, http://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/verbing-shakespeares-linguistic-innovation.
Garber, Megan. “’Friend,’ as a Verb, Is 800 Years Old.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 July 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/friend-as-a-verb-is-800-years-old/278109/.
“The Language Mavens.” The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial, 1994, pp. 379–381.
Grammaphile 