A while ago I was wondering what the verb form of nostalgia was, and not unexpectedly thought it to be 'nostalgize'. But I decided to google it anyway and stumbled upon this interesting list of newly verbified words. Has some nice additions to the language:
http://www.ar.cc.mn.us/raygor/rdrverbs.htm
Some words that stand out:
Sunset - To lapse or expire at a preset time. "Don't forget that this commission sunsets at the end of the fiscal year."
Theatricalize - To make more theatrical or flamboyant. On National Public Radio, Susan Stamberg said of Noel Coward that he had "theatricalized himself."
Yes - To agree to. From the St. Paul Pioneer Press: "Jennifer Aniston, one of TV's 'Friends,' has yessed a marriage proposal by Tate Donovan, late of TB's 'Partners,' according to the Star."
...and many more.
Showing posts with label Linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linguistics. Show all posts
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Four secrets of English writing
Usage affects the evolution of language. The way we are using English on the Internet will forever earn us the scorn of future generations of English speakers/writers, which is why it is imperative that someone makes clear these four most basic rules of sentence construction, since, apparently, most of us either never learnt it or haven't paid enough attention to it to. There are, of course, many more rules pertaining to sentence construction and punctuation, but following the following four would make reading a great pleasure for the readers. So, here goes:
1. Every sentence begins with a capital letter. Always.
2. Choose only one of the following to terminate a sentence: . ! ? Do not use an exclamation mark and a question mark in combination to express/ask a surprised question.
3. After you've made your choice in Rule 2, use it ONLY ONCE. Using 27 exclamation marks at the end of a sentence doesn't mean you have a point. If you really do have a point, just one exclamation mark, if deemed necessary and appropriate, would suffice. And by extension of Rule 1, every sentence is terminated by only one period (or full stop). Always. Furthermore, it's easier to use one than seven or eight.
4. There exists a space after a period (or full stop) and a comma. Be wise in using or not using commas. "Let's eat, grandma" is not the same as "let's eat grandma."
While occasional typos and punctuation or capitalization errors can be forgiven, celebrating our ignorance of it cannot be. It's not enough to get the point across. That's like saying as long as there is a ground to sleep on and a roof to protect us from the sun and rain, it's enough. No, its not.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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):
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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