Verbification and Nounsense

I try to accept the fact that our language is changing all the time, and the comments on these blog posts demonstrate quite nicely that any given evolution in English usage will bother certain readers while others will be all “so what?” about it.

One trend – not a new one – that drives many language mavens up the wall is the verbification of nouns.  Just a few weeks ago, a San Francisco politician was quoted in our local paper as saying “I’m thinking about referending this issue.”  That seemed over the top to me, and for what it’s worth, my spell-checker agrees.

Another one I came across recently was this: “Captain Kirk and his other-planetary sidekick Spock helmed the Starship Enterprise’s fealty coalition…”  Sometimes I think writers are trying to “punch up” their language, as their editors may have demanded; however, “helmed” simply seems awkward.

Business jargon provides plenty of maddening examples, such as "consensing" and "sourcing".  Some of my very dear friends in the training and development field insist on describing the outcome of workshops as “learnings” rather than “lessons” – backforming a noun from a verb, in other words.  I really don’t understand this one, because lessons is a perfectly good word, and learnings doesn’t communicate anything that is clearer or subtler.

One of my least favorite in the verb-as-noun category is “invite” instead of “invitation”; along the same vein a newly published author described his experience as “I was a research embed in Kandahar”, thus nounifying a verb that has already taken on a new context since the recent wars began.

According to William Safire, Benjamin Franklin was known to complain about the use of nouns as verbs; interestingly, he complained about ones that we completely accept today, such as “notice” and “advocate”.  And there are plenty of words that legitimately serve as both nouns and verbs, including act, film, guess, reply, design, type.

Just to show that it's not all black and white, a novel I recently read used some lovely, descriptive verbifications that for some reason didn’t bother me at all.  Two of these were “We kerchiefed the grit out of our eyes” and “He wheelbarrowed a load of hay to the barn.”  Perhaps it’s more acceptable in fiction?

Actually, while we know that the human brain is marvelously flexible, it turns out that nouns and verbs really are different, brainwise.  In 2010, Science Daily reported that using brain imaging technology, two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist showed that the part of the brain that activates when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learned.   

So does that mean that when we nounify a verb, or verbify a noun, we’re confusing our left- or right-brained psyches?  Who knows what lurks in the mind of man?