Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
What verb describes the act of creating a new verb from another part of speech? Verbify, of course — or, simply, verb. Both of these words are autological — that is, they exemplify what they describe. (Other examples of autological words: pentasyllabic, adjectival, nominalization.)
Any noun can be verbed. So can many adjectives: we prettify a room, neaten our desk and brown a piece of meat. As Calvin succinctly explains to Hobbes, “Verbing weirds language.”
Like mutants in nature, most newly minted verbs — Mondayize, speechify, Californicate — will live for only a short while and perish without progeny. A recent example is the verb Eastwood, which went viral on Twitter and YouTube in the days following Clint Eastwood’s speech to the 2012 Republican National Convention. Within weeks, the fad for Eastwooding — talking to an empty chair — had already petered out.
Surname-inspired verbs seldom outlive their namesakes. (Two notable exceptions are bowdlerize and mesmerize, coined in dubious honor of the Shakespearean expurgator Thomas Bowdler and the physician Friedrich Anton Franz Mesmer, respectively.) Most of the verbified proper names in Paul Simon’s 1965 song “A Simple Desultory Philippic” — John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d, Lou Adlered, Barry Sadlered — are already obsolescent.
Verbs derived from brand names face a similarly brief life span before being thrown to rest, like Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge,” uncoffined. We no longer Xerox documents or Hoover carpets. Will our children’s grandchildren still Google references and Facebook their friends? Probably not.
No one knows why some nouns mutate into verbs while others do not. We horse around, outfox our enemies, parrot a phrase, grouse about the weather, bird-dog a solution and mouse over a hyperlink. However, we do not penguin or giraffe.
Did you spot the oddball in the paragraph above? The verb grouse, the version that means “to grumble or complain,” has no etymological link to the game bird. In an interesting case of reverse etymology, however, the noun grouse is now sometimes used to describe a grumpy person: “My next-door neighbor is such a grouse.”
Linguists use the terms “zero derivation” and “functional shifting” to describe the morphing of a noun into a verb or vice versa with minimal or no change of form: bristle, thumb, stump. Impatient authors can hurry this process along through the rhetorical device known as anthimeria, deliberately employing words from one grammatical category as though they belonged to another. The phrase pimp my ride is a double anthimeria: the noun has been verbed, the verb nouned.
Do mutant verbs enrich the English language or pollute it? When Shakespeare uses an anthimerial verb such as peace, uncle or ghost, we praise his genius. But when our boss urges us to solutionize a problem, we run screaming from the room. Whatever happened to solve?
The craze for -ization — a word first employed by Charles Dickens in “Our Mutual Friend” — has been around for a very long time. The patron saint of rampant suffixization is Thomas Nashe, author of the 1593 pamphlet “Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem.” His ebullient creations included myrmidonize, unmortalize, anthropophagize, retranquillize, cabbalize, palpabrize, superficialize and citizenize — not to mention collachrymate, assertionate and intercessionate. Taken to task for his over-the-top vocabulary, Nashe later defended himself in the pamphlet’s second edition, comparing his “swelling and boystrous” coinages to the “great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues,” amassed by wealthy men in exchange for lesser currency.
More than four centuries later, new verbs formed with -ize, -ate and -ify still irk and unsettle, like lab rats with bulbous tumors and supernumerary limbs. Stephen Colbert’s nouns truthiness and wikiality touch a similar nerve. What’s next? Truthify? Wikialize?
Inevitably, some neologistic verbs will find their way into our dictionaries and our daily lives. That’s how language works. We can shoo them away, or we can celebrationalize their spooky radioactive glow. Either way, the mutants just keep coming.
Thank you to Ben Yagoda (pimp my ride), Maurizio (uncoffined), Dr. Emmett Brown (solutionize) and all the other Draft readers who contributed perceptive comments on mutant verbs, zombie nouns and the Writer’s Diet test.
Helen Sword teaches at the University of Auckland and has published widely on academic writing, higher education pedagogy, modernist literature and digital poetics. Her latest book is “Stylish Academic Writing” (Harvard University Press 2012).