verbiologising

Personally, I love hearing language manipulated forcefully into new forms. It's like hearing tomorrow's languages being born in real time.

I done Homer Simpson'd something up once again.

can i make it clear that my rational opinion on this p[rocess it utterly neutral, or more towards nickalicious' view. just 'impacted' grates slightly on a silly personal level, but i dont know why.

i think the paradigm of 'noun = stress on first syll., verb = stress on second' that works for a lot of of these maybe a reason why people get so angry about it. like, 'they cant even say it right!'

1) Using a noun as a verb when it's used to express something that no previously existing verbs could properly express (such as: "I had to google your name to get your email.").

2) Using a noun as a verb in lieu of an actual properly modified verb-form of the word (fr'instance saying "actioned my change request rather than enacted my change request).

The second one sometimes bugs me a little, like someone's too lazy to bother with using words that already exist, whereas I get a kick out of the first one, where someone uses a newly created word form to express a phenomenon not easily expressed in already existing words.

For instance -- impact was a verb first. The noun was derived from it. We're used to hearing the noun more often, probably because both were originally used only for physical things (not "the impact of prescriptive grammar on dialect formation" but "the impact of a meteor on the surface of the Earth"), and the verb has more simple synonyms like "hit" and "strike" (one of the weird unwritten "rules" of English is that usage tends to cluster around words with many different meanings, rather than the one word which can mean only what you want to say).

(Don't ask me for my source on that last bit, because the only linguistics book I haven't packed is Saussure -- but if you're bored today, pay attention to what people around you are saying, and what words they're using. Once you notice this thing, you can notice it a lot. It's one of those weird counter-intuitive bits of English: it has not only the largest vocabulary of any language, but in many linguists' view, the largest active vocabulary, i.e. the most words which are in frequent use and understood by a majority of the native speakers; and yet with all those words we're using, we still skew towards ambiguity.)

Engaging in optogyration.