nerbs and vouns

[GuiltyPleasure]

Centuries ago, in primary school, I was taught that read and write are verbs as in....she loved to read poetry....and...he planned to write a poem.....and yet it has morphed into a noun.....her read lacked substance...or....his write was well recieved. Am I just out of step with current trends?

Discuss please.

 

[Angeline]

Centuries ago, in primary school, I was taught that read and write are verbs as in....she loved to read poetry....and...he planned to write a poem.....and yet it has morphed into a noun.....her read lacked substance...or....his write was well recieved. Am I just out of step with current trends?

Discuss please.

In some cases, like "impact" as a verb, it's unfortunate eh? There's a noun that historically was used as a verb in a strictly medical sense (to be impacted). Otherwise you only saw it as part of adverbial phrase (e.g., to impact upon, shortened from to have an impact on, where the noun use is more clear). My point being language changes, whether or not for the best being a matter of opinion.

If you look at a lot of combined words like letterhead or steamroller they would have been two words at one point, then hyphenated and, as usage become more common, been made into single words. If you've ever meandered through the Oxford English Dictionary, you know how interesting it can be to read derivations and see how usage and meaning change over time.

I kinda think we owe the current noun to verb morphing to Bill "Big Dog" Clinton and his promise to grow the economy. Before that one spoke of economic growth. And after he began using that phrase America at least seemed to see a lot more vouning and nerbing as you so cleverly put it. So now someone says, "It impacted me," and I say, ew.

But that's just my addled opinion.

 

[Merman1984]

shock of the new

as for being taught in school, well, we were taught how to follow rules, memorize things to get an A on the test, get our certificates and diplomas, and become obedient workers in a consumerist society. rules are UNNATURAL. all rules have exceptions, and are meant to be broken. a real world education teaches how to think for yourself, and when to bend and break the rules.

one of the things that makes good art so delightful is that it helps you see the world in some new, fresh way. break a rule, call it shock of the new if you want. however, the fortieth time you get nerbed and vouned probably isn't gonna have the same impact. btw i am not talking about people who don't know what they are doing.

 

[butters]

change is the only constant

embrace the changes you like, reject those you don't. just stay flexible in your approach and the world will turn more smoothly or some such shit.

i have various old dictionaries, ranging back over a century, and it's quite wonderful (for me, anyway) to observe the way language continues to morph. it's also a little sad that some beautiful language appears extinct, having fallen out of favour for these times.

 

[butters]

to add:

the purpose of language is communication. so long as there's a generic understanding of what the words mean (given context) then communication is not lost. us getting on a little, though, may start to feel a bit stranded if we don't keep our ear in for the new meanings attributed to the familiar, or remain closed to new currency.

 

[theognis]

In some cases, like "impact" as a verb, it's unfortunate eh? There's a noun that historically was used as a verb in a strictly medical sense (to be impacted). Otherwise you only saw it as part of adverbial phrase (e.g., to impact upon, shortened from to have an impact on, where the noun use is more clear). My point being language changes, whether or not for the best being a matter of opinion.

If you look at a lot of combined words like letterhead or steamroller they would have been two words at one point, then hyphenated and, as usage become more common, been made into single words. If you've ever meandered through the Oxford English Dictionary, you know how interesting it can be to read derivations and see how usage and meaning change over time.

I kinda think we owe the current noun to verb morphing to Bill "Big Dog" Clinton and his promise to grow the economy. Before that one spoke of economic growth. And after he began using that phrase America at least seemed to see a lot more vouning and nerbing as you so cleverly put it. So now someone says, "It impacted me," and I say, ew.

But that's just my addled opinion.

Angeline, you can blame Bill Clinton for a lot of things, but not this. The word 'grow' has always been a verb. By the way, I think Clinton was probably our most articulate president in my lifetime. He could talk his way out of anything, in proper English, and without missing a beat.

 

[Neonurotic]

I have two cousins who don't have proper nouns for their names, but adverbs, Sunnily and Cheerily.
Unfortunately they're neither in disposition.

And they do make fun of my name, saying I'm full of sour mash whiskey.

 

[Angeline]

I have two cousins who don't have proper nouns for their names, but adverbs, Sunnily and Cheerily.
Unfortunately they're neither in disposition.

And they do make fun of my name, saying I'm full of sour mash whiskey.

I had a Great Aunt Tilly, but I guess that's different.

Sunnily and Cheerily, huh? I think you won that one.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Am I just out of step with current trends?

My point being language changes, whether or not for the best being a matter of opinion.

change is the only constant

So...... yes, I am. Well, I'm bucking the trend, so there.

 

[Angeline]

So...... yes, I am. Well, I'm bucking the trend, so there.

It's not one of the better trends. It's not impacting me in a good way.

 

[kitten1964]

Why the English language thrives

...is change.

No, not all changes are good, to those of us who love English as is. But English is the robust language it is because it changes. It adapts and grows. Languages that don't tend to die off.

Sorry - I minored in linguistics at college and it's a love of mine. It's fascinating to see how languages evolve and grow - or not evolve and wither away.

 

[bronzeage]

...is change.

No, not all changes are good, to those of us who love English as is. But English is the robust language it is because it changes. It adapts and grows. Languages that don't tend to die off.

Sorry - I minored in linguistics at college and it's a love of mine. It's fascinating to see how languages evolve and grow - or not evolve and wither away.

We have been fortunate English is one of the languages where the forces of purity have always failed to keep popular usage out of the lexicon.

The French were so upset to see "jumbo jet" in French print, they set about to create pure French terms so they coined "le giantique royale turboi jete," or something like that.

Never mind that we took "Jumbo" from the name of a very big elephant. This would seem to be a universal metaphor, but since Jumbo was not a French elephant, he did not qualify.

The border between nouns and verbs has always been fluid in English, because it is efficient. We use our language to communicate and all that matters is whether or not the meaning is understood. It does not have to be understood by everyone. Sometimes the intent is to confuse some and inform others. Do you dig it, Daddio? Of course you do.

 

[twelveoone]

Centuries ago, in primary school, I was taught that read and write are verbs as in....she loved to read poetry....and...he planned to write a poem.....and yet it has morphed into a noun.....her read lacked substance...or....his write was well recieved. Am I just out of step with current trends?

Discuss please.

Recheck Shakespeare, he was the main trender, what this does is it creates a brain reaction, that has been shown by neuroimaging.

 

[champagne1982]

Centuries ago, in primary school, I was taught that read and write are verbs as in....she loved to read poetry....and...he planned to write a poem.....and yet it has morphed into a noun.....her read lacked substance...or....his write was well recieved. Am I just out of step with current trends?

Discuss please.

They're like gerunds without the ing... verbs as nouns. At least I think. But, really, people have been using these terms for more years than I've been here (and the use is rampant on Lit). For instance, I've seen these "nouns" adorn the jacket blurbs on many bestsellers so maybe those who aren't trendy reviewers have adopted the use of them in order to seem to be a trendy know-it-all critic.

 

[bronzeage]

Recheck Shakespeare, he was the main trender, what this does is it creates a brain reaction, that has been shown by neuroimaging.

I knew it wouldn't be long before someone shakespeared this thread.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

From the NY Times

The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns

By Henry Hitchimgs


In my previous essay, I wrote about nominalization — the deployment as nouns of words we mostly expect to encounter as verbs or adjectives. Aware of many people’s tendency to vilify this kind of usage, I speculated about the psychology behind it. I was interested in thinking about why someone might prefer “Do you have a solve for this problem?” to “Can you solve this problem?”

Like many of the readers who commented, I find that some nominalizations are useful and others are jarring. I can accept that language changes (and has to change) without necessarily cherishing all manifestations of that change. I don’t shudder when I see or hear “This year’s spend is excessive” and “Her book was a good read,” even though I can think of other, perhaps more elegant ways of saying these things. On the other hand, “There is no undo for that” strikes me as infelicitous, and I am still not completely comfortable with the use of the noun “disconnect” as a synonym for “disparity” or “discrepancy” — although it has been around since the 1980s.

In some cases a nominalization is the specialist vocabulary of a particular profession or community: it has connotations of expertise and — less often — of an insider’s self-regard. For instance, people who work in software talk about the “build,” and I recently heard a real estate agent speak of creating a “seduce” for property. When these terms of art gain wider currency, it is largely because nonspecialists are eager to seem conversant with the ins and outs of an esoteric subject. Sometimes we adopt such terms in a jocular or satirical spirit — but end up using them without a whiff of irony.

In the last couple of decades, many condensed forms of expression have achieved currency thanks to the spread of electronic communication: when we bash out e-mails and text messages, we feel the need for speed. Several readers made this point. Nominalizations allow us to pack the information in our sentences more densely. This urgency comes in other guises: nouns get verbed as often as verbs get nouned. (I had to go and lie down after writing that.)

What I didn’t discuss in my first post was the dark side of nominalization. It’s not just that nominalization can sap the vitality of one’s speech or prose; it can also eliminate context and mask any sense of agency. Furthermore, it can make something that is nebulous or fuzzy seem stable, mechanical and precisely defined. That may sound like a virtue, but it’s really a way of repudiating ambiguity and complexity.

RELATED IN DRAFT
Henry Hitchings: Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns
Helen Sword: Zombie Nouns
Nominalizations give priority to actions rather than to the people responsible for them. Sometimes this is apt, perhaps because we don’t know who is responsible or because responsibility isn’t relevant. But often they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics and in business. They emphasize products and results, rather than the processes by which products and results are achieved.

I touched previously on “What is the ask?” As an alternative to “What are they asking?” or “What are we being asked to do?” this can seem crisp. It takes an aerial view of an issue. But it calculatedly omits reference to the people doing the asking, as a way of keeping their authority and power out of the question.

At the same time, by turning the act of asking into something narrow and impersonal, “What is the ask?” repositions a question as a command. It leaves little or no room for the “ask” to be refused. As a noun, “ask” is pretty much a synonym for “order.” Even when we retain details of agency — as in “What is their ask of us?” – the noun ossifies what could and should be a more dynamic process.

Compared with “What is the ask?” the question “What’s the take-away from today’s lecture?” may look harmless. Yet it minimizes audience members’ sense of their responsibility to absorb the lecture’s lessons. “What should I take away from today’s lecture?” is a question that betrays a cramped and probably exam-focused understanding of what it means to learn. But “What’s the take-away?” seems to represent education as a product rather than a practice. It invites an answer that’s a sound bite, a Styrofoam-sheathed portion of spice, a handy little package to be slavishly reproduced.

Such phrasing also curtails the lecturer’s role, making him or her not so much a source of ideas and a repository of intellectual trust as a purveyor of data packets. This may be an unhappy accident, or it may be strategic – perhaps a disavowal of the very notion that education is personal.

Nominalizations aren’t intrinsically either good or bad. Yet, used profusely, they strip the humanity out of what we write and say. They can also be furtively political. Their boosters see them as marvels of concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a specious and ethically doubtful simplicity.

Henry Hitchings

 

[todski28]

I've always thought of the English language as organic. Though I am not educated very well, you can see how quickly it can evolve to suit usages. look at the way words are squashed down for text messages, or e-mails. so you have a constant survival of the fittest. You get random usage words that tend to trend for a while then they just up and dissapear, until you hear someone say it at a random interval and you remember you used to use that word like a dirty whore.

The word Totes for totally, etc (etcetera), some of it like the forementioned totes annoys the shit out of me, but as long as meaning is gleaned in the English language and it is used enough it tends to become a word in its own right.

mind you I'm not even 100% what verb, or a noun is, let alone, pro-nouns, ab-verds and all the other crazy stuff that makes up written and verbal communication.

 

[twelveoone]

Centuries ago, in primary school, I was taught that read and write are verbs as in....she loved to read poetry....and...he planned to write a poem.....and yet it has morphed into a noun.....her read lacked substance...or....his write was well recieved. Am I just out of step with current trends?


Discuss please.

How old are you?
And some nouns just don't sound right as verbs, so it takes time for our ears to adjust to their oddity. It's worth remembering that 40 years ago, usage commentators roundly condemned verbs we don't think twice about using today, such as "chair," "debut," "critique," "contact" and "host."

....what linguists call "functional shift" or "conversion" - the process of shifting or converting a word's function in a sentence from one part of speech to another.

the Henry Hitchimgs article you posted, I hope everyone reads, as stated previously a lot of research is being done in this area. Who funds the research? What uses do you think they can be applied to? Orwellian scenario? Not needed, how many brain farts do you see walking around here? Easy words glossing over dim receptors. Think it through, break that crust - one level deeper, you see a picture. Someone says something there is a code behind it, learn the code, wah laa "'imaginary gardens with real toads in them" or in literotica's case sometimes
'imaginary literature with real tampons behind it'. Now if this seems a slam on women, it is a bigger slam on the "men" to whom it is primarily directed at.

tod, the 10,000 things a link that leads to other links, (including Tess's post) do you need to know the terms, fuck no, but it helps to know it is there, as to your confusion as to...it is far fuzzier than was assumed.