Why is “verbing” annoying？

编者按

英语中普遍存在“verbing”这种现象。那么什么是verbing呢？先看看下面这段对话：

Calvin: I like to verb words.
Hobbes: What?

Calvin: 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.

Verbing weirds language.

Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

简而言之，'verbing'就是将名词、形容词等活用为动词。例如：I friended you.(我加你好友了）；You can google it.( 你可以谷歌一下）。

接下来让我们一起来看看BBC 对这种现象的介绍，verbing从何而来？又带给了我们什么样的困扰？

“The verbing of nouns is as old as the English language,” says Patricia O’Conner, author of Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. In fact, she says, experts estimate (not to be confused with the noun form ‘estimate’, which is pronounced differently) that 20% of all English verbs were originally nouns. And the phenomenon seems to be snowballing (there’s another one). Since 1900, says O’Conner, about 40% of all of our new verbs have come from nouns.

This is called denominalisation, which is the technical term for converting a noun to a verb. There are two ways to accomplish this conversion. You can either affix the noun with a suffix, like -ify, as in purify or clarify. Or you can do what we’ve been doing, and just steal a thing and do it. The name for the second option is zero derivation – because nothing is changed when the verb is derived from a noun in this way. 

Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief at Random House, says when verbing happens, “we notice or we don’t. We either like the sound or we don’t.” That is, someone verbs a noun, and we let them continue their sentence, or we interrupt them with screams or threats of physical assault.

Why is verbing sometimes annoying？

We’re comfortable hosting a party but we might take umbrage at the thought of ‘medalling’ in sport.“Sometimes a new verb comes along and it takes people by surprise,” says O’Conner. “They object to it because people resist what is unfamiliar to them.” That’s why even though we’re comfortable hosting a party, we might take umbrage at the thought of ‘medalling’ in sport, which is not to be confused with meddling in sport. 

Athletes were said by commentators to have ‘medalled’ and ‘podiumed’ at the Rio Olympics. 

Verbed nouns are popular because they are so easily understood.Most verbed nouns, though, don’t require all involved parties to be up on their pop culture references. That’s one of the reasons why verbed nouns are so popular: they are so easily understood. “I’m sure the first person who asked, ‘Does this cloth yellow?’ was instantly understood,” says O’Conner. Same thing for the first person who was asked to hand something over.

Thankfully,English encourages our ease.The reason English has the largest lexicon of any language is because parts of speech very readily change functions.  Rain is spelled and pronounced the same whether it’s a noun or a verb. That’s not the case with all verb/noun word pairs. Have you ever housed someone in your house? Then you know the verb form, it sounds like there’s a ‘z’ in it. Maybe you would like to present me a present? Whether you’re the giver or receiver depends on which syllable you stress.

So are there any rules for verbing? 

Dreyer, the editor, doesn’t offer a rule, but suggests that people who verbify think twice about verbing a noun if it is easily replaced by an already existing popular verb. Make sure it’s descriptive but not silly-sounding, he says.

But in the end, style is subjective.  “Everything is in the ear of the beholder. Or hearer.”

Of course, sometimes we want our verbs to sound silly, which is especially the case on social media. Think of phrases like “Do you even science, bro?” or “Let me librarian that for you!” The verbing is being done ironically. The speakers aren’t intending to introduce a new conversion into the English language.

编者注：本文节选自BBC网站

［版权声明］本文版权为原作者所有，任何机构、平台及微信公众号需要转载，必须取得授权并遵守刊发规范。