The trend of taking nouns and transforming them into verbs
was hot for a while, having bubbled up as business jargon as
managers sought to workshop ideas and effort solutions. It is excruciating
rhetoric that persists in some degree, but has also become a caricature of
itself, so few serious business environments still propagate this kind of
pompous doublespeak.
This is English though, and some of these words retain
respect and even enjoy standardization, the premium example of which has additionally
become the generic descriptor for all search engines, Google. Who hasn’t verbed
Google? And yes, the word verbing is an
example of verbing. Others that have become acceptable within my lifetime include plating (in restaurants) and accessing.
Not all nouns that have slipped past the gatekeepers and have
successfully become verbs in recent memory are as charming, including impact
and dialog. Both are in the dictionary as verbs, so the damage has already been done. The most
horrific verbed nouns though are born of haphazard gerund creation, words like
actioning, solutioning, and the worst I’ve heard lately, clienting. Sadly,
incentivizing has made the cut and is now a word.
As is often the case, Bill Watterson's Calvin said it best: "Verbing
weirds language."
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