When nouns and trademarks become verbs

There is a tendency in people to replace longer words with the shorter (‘faking’ for ‘counterfeiting’), to cut down the length of the words (‘fundas’ for ‘fundamentals’) and to abbreviate words, especially when such words are used in high frequency. (This helpful site ranks words on the basis of their usage). But at the same time, there is yet another tendency to replace an entire group of words with a single word, changing the very grammatical construct of the replacing word. In the course of this treatment, adjectives become nouns, nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, and adverbs become something else. Some, presumably traditionalists, frown upon meddling with language like this, more so when it is done on a large scale, but such frowning speaks more of their own lack of understanding of the development of language than it does the so-called offenders.

Linguistics reserves a special chapter for the study of functional changes taking place in words: Conversion. Conversion is a form of Derivation (also a linguistic terminology, meaning the creation of a new word from an existing word, the new word being of a different spelling) wherein a word changes its part of speech without undergoing any change in its spelling. As mentioned earlier, nouns becoming verbs, for example, is a kind of Conversion and is specifically called verbification. Verbification is a much happening, though less noticed, process in all languages of the world, and more so in widely spoken ones – in our case, English. It facilitates word economy in written as well as spoken English and cuts down redundancy and awkwardness. This example makes it clear:

Statement A: Don’t tell lies. (lie: noun)
Statement B: Don’t lie. (lie: verb)

Both sentences mean exactly the same, but B is always more preferable. It’s concise, economic, and doesn’t sound awkward.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, particularly 20th Century onwards, such Conversion is no longer restricted to words already present in the English language. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he might not have thought so much of the linguistic usage of his invention as much as he did of its working, but very soon, to his and everyone else’s convenience, the word ‘telephone’, while a neologism, was verbified. It isn’t very uncommon today to hear someone saying, “I’ll telephone you tonight.” And the same applies for the term SMS (a.k.a. text messaging in the West). It’s verbified. Or you could also look at 'blog'. With the technological invention, it was a neologism, a noun. Now, blog is a verb, too ("I love blogging").

Lately, this verification has taken another step forward with trademarks, albeit with a slight twist. Despite the fact that verbification is a productive process in language, it is, say the corporate representatives, an equally unproductive process for the companies whose trademarks are being verbified. In fact, they would go so far as to call it “genericide” and call those who use it as “guilty of genericide.” Nice.

Xerox is perhaps one of the most commonly verbified trademarks. While the actual process is to be called photocopying, almost all of us have at some point made the statement, “xerox it” (with a small x, though it doesn’t make any difference in speech). It even finds an entry as a verb and with a small x in all leading English dictionaries. The problem these companies have with their trademarks being used as verbs or nouns is that the trademark loses its association with the company and becomes a generic term for the process of doing it or for the generic product and hence the brand loses its popularity ‘rights’ over the trademark. Xerox, for example, is so widely used as a verb that the other day I overheard a guy saying he’ll xerox the paper in this machine when the machine in question was a Canon photocopier. It’s good for linguistic conciseness, yes, but bad for the company Xerox that has lost its market value to the now-generic term xeroxing – the process of photocopying. "Using a Xerox photocopier" gives more credit and attention to the brand Xerox than does "xeroxing".

Google, too, has been the victim of genericide, and its founders woefully dissented, in vain, against Oxford Dictionary’s decision of including google as a verb in the dictionary in 2006. Google is now the generic term for searching the Internet for keywords using Google Search Engine, and soon it’ll be a generic term for the process of searching keywords on the Internet. Other trademarks belonging to this category are Hoover (a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners; now hoovering – the process of cleaning with a vacuum cleaner), Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop, a software for editing photos; now photoshopping – the process of editing photos in Adobe Photoshop), and most recently, as voted second by people in Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007, facebook – a verb – for the process of browsing (doing whatever) in the popular social networking site Facebook (“Did you facebook today?”).

Maybe there is an inherent logic to the structure of these words (trademarks) that give us the tendency to verbify them. Photoshopping is structurally similar to ‘shopping’, facebooking is to ‘booking’. That can explain why very few these trademarks get verbified and most do not. But whatever the tendency, it increases the ease with which language is spoken, written, and concisely expressed, and that is what language is all about.

However, I would like to point out at Sony’s shameless attempt to verbify their logo. It’s one thing if people verbify a word, but a totally different thing if the company itself forces it down. And fails. It doesn’t even belong to the field of linguistics, since it’s a damn logo, but here it is, whatever it means ("I Sony it"? or maybe "I Ericsson it", or perhaps "I love it", in which case it is even more shameless than it is to verbify their own trademark):

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