Alan from Omaha, Nebraska, finds himself turning nouns into verbs, telling his daughter he’s glad she’s old enough to start to human and using jenga as a verb to refer to arranging items carefully, after the game Jenga, which involves removing blocks from a tower so that the whole thing doesn’t fall. A large percentage of everyday verbs in English come from nouns. Linguists call the process of turning nouns into verbs denominalization. An excellent source on this topic is The Prodigal Tongue (Bookshop|Amazon) by linguist Lynne Murphy. She points out two words that have made the round trip from noun to verb more than once: caterer comes from the verb to cater which comes from a noun cater, which is a person who cated, which comes from the verb to cate, meaning “to dress food.” The noun impact followed a similarly circuitous path. This is part of a complete episode.
What makes a great first line of a book? How do the best authors put together an initial sentence that draws you in and makes you want to read more? We’re talking about the openings of such novels as George Orwell’s 1984...
To slip someone a mickey means to doctor a drink and give it to an unwitting recipient. The phrase goes back to Mickey Finn of the Lone Star Saloon in Chicago, who in the late 19th century was notorious for drugging certain customers and relieving...
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