Transcript of “Turning Verbs into Nouns”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Alan Teeley. I’m calling from Omaha.
I was talking to my daughter the other day, getting groceries, and I told her that I’m finally glad enough, glad that she’s old enough to start to human. And that got to me thinking about other times that I’ve turned nouns into verbs. Most prominently, Jenga and adulting. And I was wondering if there was other examples of it going way back when or if it’s something recent coming out of, like, meme culture and the speed of information nowadays.
Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. Let me ask you, just out of personal curiosity, because I have a 14-year-old, how old should someone be when they’re ready to human?
Oh, probably about 8 to 10, something like that. A whole enough to open doors and carry groceries in.
Very good.
Yeah. And to think of it themselves instead of being told.
Yep.
Okay, good, good. But I like Jenga as a verb, right? You Jenga the moving boxes in the truck or you Jenga the groceries in the cabinet, something like that. And hope they don’t all fall.
Yeah, exactly. I like that too. What we’re talking about is changing a word’s part of speech. We’re talking about turning a noun into a verb, and this is called denominalization, which is a type of conversion that creates a denominal verb. But it’s commonly called verbing, so let’s just use that.
And there’s a famous Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin tells Hobbes, I like to verb words, and the summary is verbing weirds language, and it does indeed. But this has been going on in English since English was English. It’s one of the most common ways that we make new words, where we take nouns and we make verbs. And it’s something that’s really characteristic of English.
Because not all words can do this. Our nouns don’t have inflected endings. That is, except for adding an S to make them plural, typically our nouns don’t change very much, no matter what else is happening in the sentence. Whereas other languages, the nouns may change depending on what else is happening in the sentence, even beyond things like plural.
So there was a great book that Martha and I have talked about on the show before called The Prodigal Tongue. Linguist Lynn Murphy did a sample of entries from the Oxford English Dictionary for that book, and she estimated that about half of the verbs in her sample were verbs made from nouns. So that’s a very large number of words in English where verbs were made from nouns.
I think, Alan, if we were to do a complete survey, the number would probably be lower, but it’s still going to be a very large number of everyday verbs in English come from nouns. So, for example, we’re really glad, Alan, that you phoned us.
Yeah. Did you have to elbow somebody out of the way to do it?
Well, I did have to stop coding, so.
You had to stop coding.
There you go. Very good. There you go.
In her book, The Prodigal Tongue, Lynn Murphy has two really great examples of words that have made the round trip from noun to verb more than once. And one of them is the noun caterer, you know, someone who provides food for a party. Caterer comes from the verb to cater, which comes from a noun cater, which is a person who catered, which is from a verb to cater, which means to dress food.
Another example Lynn Murphy gives is the verb to impact. The verb meaning to press in became the noun impact, meaning an impression, which became the verb to make an impression. In any case, so this is a very ordinary way to make words in English. It’s incredibly common, and there’s nothing modern in particular about it.
Oh, cool. I imagine with time then, adulting will just be ubiquitous to everybody then.
It might fade. It still has the tinge of slang about it. There were a couple of great studies about nouns turned into verbs, and one of them noted that in many cases, the most successful verbs that were made from nouns are physical things.
So parts of the body, for example, are very successfully turned into verbs. You hand somebody something. You leg it down the road. You thumb a ride. You thumb a ride. You back into a space. There’s just many of these.
Well, cool.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you very much for your call, Alan. Give us a call sometime if you want to interrupt your coding.
Will do. Thank you much.
All right. Take care now. Bye-bye.
Yep. Bye-bye.
