NOTE: Following the practice that I learned and taught throughout my career, I have italicized words when they are used as words, e. g. Fire can be either a noun, verb, or adjective, depending on the context of its use. I know that you folks don’t like this practice, but there it is. My wife, a Latin teacher and better grammarian than I (me?) found this difficult to read without the italics.
A couple of weeks ago the Monitor published a piece by a woman from Strafford County critical of a usage that she felt was becoming too prevalent. Being a language fanatic, I started to read it with the assumption that I would jump on her bandwagon. By the time I finished the article, however, I found myself dissenting and I hope that explaining why will illustrate how English is always evolving. I have chosen to offer that explanation here, in my regular venue, rather than in the Monitor itself.
She objected to the common practice nowadays of turning nouns into verbs. Among her examples: (a) Plate the food. (b) Friend us on Facebook. (c) We text each other all the time. (d) What are you referencing? (e) Let’s transition to the weather.
I knew that some research was called for and consulted my well-worn copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the arbiter of language issues during my 34 years at Concord High School. It’s not as comprehensive as the Oxford English Dictionary in the library, but is more than adequate and a good deal handier.
I started with “Plate the food.” Plate is a noun of long standing, going back to the 13th century, but here is clearly used as an imperative verb. The passage of centuries got me thinking about other common nouns, and I soon discovered that many transitioned into verbs a century or more after they first appears as nouns. For example, truck, which goes back to 1611 as a noun, waits until about 1748 to become a verb. But I don’t think anyone would object to saying, “FEMA trucked in food and water from 16 states after Katrina hit New Orleans.”
Dock is another of my favorites. Sometime in the 1400s it appeared as an “artificial basin or enclosure for the reception of ships.” It does not appear as a verb, “to haul or guide into a dock,” until 1660. “Dock the boat” sounds an awful lot like “plate the food” (or, for that matter, “park the car,” since park follows a similar transformation from noun to verb). If we have been saying the former for 416 years, I see no reason why we can’t accept the latter.
For another, consider the old-fashioned person who promises to “phone you tomorrow.” No, no, the correct word isn’t phone, it’s telephone. Oh, no, that’s wrong, too. Telephone is a noun, not a verb. At least it was when it first appeared. Here’s its progress: (a) telephone, n. 1849. (b) telephone, v. 1879. (c) phone, n. 1884. (d) phone, v. 1899. Forty years from the long form as a noun to the clipped form as a verb. I wonder when “Give me a ring sometime” first showed up.
My Webster’s lists reference as a verb in 1891, one of its meanings being “to cite in or use as a reference,” so that too has a lengthy provenance. And “friend me on Facebook” is not simply a creation of social media. Shakespeare used it as a verb, and my favorite example is by one Philemon Holland, in a translation of Livy in 1600: “They had undertaken the war upon King Philip, because he had friended and aided the Carthaginians.” Astonishingly, it antedates befriend as a verb, being more than 300 years older.
Two conclusions. (1) Some usage that seems new and shocking actually isn’t. (2) More importantly, our language is changing because it has always been changing and will continue to do so. It is an instrument of mazing flexibility, grabbing words from all over the world and tossing them together in creative combinations. Playing Scrabble, my wife and I have no problem using text as a verb. We even use sext. After all, they produce texting and sexting, two seven-letter words worth 50 bonus points, and we can’t afford to pass up those opportunities. Some day our Scrabble Dictionary will catch up to us.
