Verbification

From ArticleWorld

Verbification or verbing is a process that changes the grammatical and syntactical function of a noun or adjective to that of a verb or participle. Verbing is commonly oberved in contemporary American English, though it takes place to a lesser degree in all variants. Verbing is often the result of back-formation, and common practice is to add 'ate', 'ify', or 'ize' to form verbs. Often words are turned into verbs to make them longer in the belief that length adds formality, expertise, or authority to the word. At other times verbs are formed to make a sentence, project, or individual more active. Some 'verbed' forms have become accepted parts of Standard English, while others remain contentious.

Acceptance continuum

Many words in everyday use are the result of verbing, such as ship, drink, divorce. Common examples of verbification that are acceptable or border on acceptable outside the US are 'chair' (chair the meeting), 'host' (host the gathering), 'impact' (the budget impacts my decision), and 'access' (access my email), IM (we IM'ed for two hours today). Some forms that are used only by a few people, notably US media outlets, include 'medal' (American gymnasts are medaling well at the meet), 'reference' (do not reference a competitor's work), 'action' (let's action that decision now). Verbs resulting from back-formation include edit from editor, injure from injury, and enthuse from enthusiasm.

Language and expert knowledge

Words verbed to sound more more authoritative often involve lengthening. This tends to happen in the field of office work or business administration, or when professional, technical, or jargon words seep into everyday public usage. For example, 'conferencing' (let's conference this proposal tomorrow), 'bulglarize' (the thief burglarized the store), 'incentivize' (our department is incentivizing productivity), 'decisioning' (we're decisioning that right now), 'innovating' (the tech department innovated a solution to the glitch), and 'obligated' (we're obligated to pay the fee).

Linguists' assessments

Verbing runs into oppositions for a number of reasons. Neologisms are often perceived as unwieldy or not felicitious. Some verbing is taken as a sign of an unqualified person using sloppy language to sound like an expert, or covering up incompetence by using active verbs, which is perceived as 'energetic'. Although some neologisms that result from verbing are solecisms (decisioning, obligated, burglarized), criticism of the process is sometimes rooted more in dislike of change than in desired grammatical purity. A much quoted opinion from the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes holds that 'Verbing wierds language'. Cognitive scientist and psycholinguist Stephen Pinker writing in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language identifies verbing as one of the distinctive features of the English language, 'what makes English English.