There are two certainties about language; one is it always changes and two is that people will object to those changes.
So says professor Paul Warren who joined Karyn Hay to talk about verbing.
Prof Warren quotes from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on the subject. Calvin is a little boy and Hobbes is his friend a tiger.
Photo: Professor Paul Warren
“Calvin says ‘I like to verb words’ and Hobbes the Tiger says 'What?' Calvin responds ‘I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when access was a thing, now it's something you do - it got verbed’ - and then Calvin carries on ‘verbing weirds language’.
“And Hobbes rather philosophically says; ‘maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.’”
Nevertheless, Prof Warren doesn’t think verbing is necessarily a bad thing.
“It's actually quite a good use of resources, if you've got a word that has a meaning and you can convert that from a noun to a verb, without actually making any changes, putting any endings on it, then it's reasonably efficient way of doing things.”
There are numerous examples of verbing, he says.
“When I moved to New Zealand over 20 years ago, a verb -noun that I encountered for the first time here was to farewell.
“I was used to the idea of farewell as a thing, but to farewell as a verb or something I hadn't encountered before. So to farewell somebody when they retire and so on, rather than saying farewell to somebody.”
Contact has made this transition and we barely notice it now, he says.
“In fact, the verb contact, which we probably don't bat an eye lid at now, to contact somebody. When that was first used as a verb of, please contact us later and so on there were critics who rejected it as a corruption and a ‘hideous vulgarism’.
“So, we now accept contact as a verb, just as much as we do as a noun. But at one stage, it seemed a weird thing to do.”
A new noun-verb he encountered recently is showroom.
“One I came across recently was to showroom. So, showrooming is when customers go into a brick and mortar retail store to examine the merchandise that's there. But not with any idea of buying it there.
“They then go home and go shopping online for the same product to finding it at a lower price.
“So that's the idea of showrooming looking around the showroom to find something which you then want to buy online.”
Excess is an American, and somewhat euphemistic, example of verbing, he says.
“We think of excess as a noun, meaning too much of something. But apparently for about 40 years or so excess has been used, primarily in the United States, to mean to make redundant, so to lay somebody off.
“I came across this example from the New York Times talking about a school where the roll in the school was shrinking and so they were laying people off and the example was the social worker was ‘excessed’.”
Common place nouns have long since become verbs, he says.
“Knife, fork and spoon were used as nouns before then becoming verbs.
“So, it's obviously a very productive process that we don't really notice very much. Because it's just so ubiquitous.”
