Verbifying, is the phenomena of changing non-verbs into verbs. It pops up everywhere in English! While this is nothing new, and Shakespeare himself has been “caught red-handed” using them in his tragedies, many English Language enthusiasts frown upon the colloquial use of ‘verbified’ words.
So how does Verbification happen and why do “the grammar police” care? A popular example is the search engine that we rely on to save us from boredom or rescue us from research papers: Google. The company’s name is a proper noun but has evolved into a verb today. We are all guilty. Who wants to say “I am going to check Google for the answer?” We simplify it and say, “I’ll Google the answer.” When we want to convey a point, we just get right to it, almost as if verbification is a part of human nature.
A classic example comes from the famous comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson, where Calvin ingeniously uses verbification when he says “Verbing weirds language.” He turns the noun “verb” into a gerund and uses “weird” as the verb. Forming a new word by taking an old word and re-purposing is called conversion in linguistics.
The grammar police would say that people verbify words to sound ‘proper’ or ‘authoritative,’ and that it is totally unnecessary because “real” words already exist to describe the same thing. Others argue that this kind of flexibility is what allows language to change over time and more accurate reflect cultural norms.
So when someone in your office says, “I’ll conference you into the meeting,” are they just trying to sound authoritative? How about when someone “friends” you on Facebook or “texts” you a message? Are these abuses of language, or examples of the flexibility that allows language to more closely represent who we are as a person and a society?
Verbification occurs in other languages too, but that’s a whole different post. You’ll just have to Google it for now. Ha! You just got verbified!
