Jose Carillo's Forum

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO

On this webpage, Jose A. Carillo shares with English users, learners, and teachers a representative selection of his essays on the English language, particularly on its uses and misuses. One essay will be featured every week, and previously featured essays will be archived in the forum.

Not just a curiosity piece but a little primer in verb-formation

Five years is such a long time from the word-creation standpoint of a language—particularly if that language is English. Since 2005, in fact, the English vocabulary has grown to probably over 700,000 words today from the Oxford English Dictionary’s benchmark 615,000 words that year, growing at the rate of about 25,000 words a year as projected by the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged). The brash, less discriminating U.S.-based Global Language Monitor, however, had put the 2006 figure at 991,833 words, then made such a big to do about the 1,000,000th mark having been surpassed early in 2009. Whatever the actual vocabulary figures, there’s no stopping and denying the fact that the English language is indeed growing, growing, and growing…getting more robust and more expansive because of so many advances in science and technology.

This growth in English neologisms has not only been in new nouns but in many new verbs as well. Indeed, before 2005, hidebound grammarians were bewailing the surge into the English lexicon of such computer-technology verbs as “firewall” (meaning to protect a computer system from hackers and spammers) and “architect” (meaning to design and develop a new computer setup), and the corporate world was then still getting the hang of such strange new verbs—yes, verbs not nouns—as “conference,” “leverage,” “impact,” and “office.” Today, most of these new verbs are now de rigueur in English, which now must cope and live with even newer neologisms like the verb “text” (meaning to send a written message by mobile phone) and “unfriend” (meaning to remove from one’s list of friends in Facebook).

I had pondered this noun-to-verb conversion syndrome in an essay that I wrote for my column in The Manila Times towards the end of 2005. Today, although many of the neologisms swamping English then have now become firmly entrenched in the language, I find that the same word-formation principles and processes are still very much at work. I am therefore posting the essay here not just as a curiosity piece but as a little informal primer and cautionary tale on word formation.

Click on the title below to read the essay.

The noun-to-verb conversion syndrome

One major word-formation process in English is to use the noun itself as a verb to express the action conveyed or implied by the noun, without changing the form of the noun in any way. This direct noun-to-verb conversion, one of the so-called “zero derivation” processes in linguistics, has been taking place since language began. It has given English such basic action verbs as “eye” to mean “to watch or study closely,” “nose” to mean “to search impertinently,” “face” to mean “to deal with straightforwardly,” “mouth” to mean “to talk in a pompous way,” “elbow” to mean “to shove aside,” and “stomach” to mean “to bear without overt resentment.” Rather than come up with a new word for the action that a body part typically can do literally or figuratively, English speakers simply made that body part stand for the action itself; later on, they did the same for tools, machines, and technologies. It has been estimated that by this process, something like one-fifth of all English verbs had been formed from nouns.

Creating verbs this way, which is facetiously called “nerbing” by some language observers, is particularly tempting in English because it saves time for the speaker or writer and simplifies sentence construction. For instance, rather than saying “She made a catalogue of the books,” we can use the noun “catalogue” as the verb itself, knock off the verb “made,” and say “She catalogued the books” instead. In the same token, rather than saying “The wealthy couple served as parents for the orphan until she reached legal age,” we can use the noun “parent” as the verb, drop the verb “served,” and say “The wealthy couple parented the orphan until she reached legal age.” A bonus in both cases is that aside from saving on words, the language is enriched by a new verb—a “nerb,” a synthetic term that we will use here simply for convenience.

Traditionally, jobs and the professions and occupations have been among the most prolific generators and users of English nerbs: “He mentored the student in the art of debating.” “She liaisoned with media for an entertainment company.” “He engineered the merger of the two companies.” “The unscrupulous accountant doctored the corporate books.” “The government legal counsel secretly lawyered for the powerful political family.”

Scientific, medical, and manufacturing processes have also tended to produce a generous share of nerbs: “We centrifuged the donor’s blood to harvest stem cells for the leukemia patient.” “The laboratory technician chromatographed the mixture for possible contaminants.” In this latter type of nerbs, the name of the machine is directly converted to a verb that describes its action, streamlining what would have been a longer phrase built around the verb “use” (as in “They used a centrifuge to harvest stem cells for the leukemia patient.”).

During the past few decades, of course, advances in information technology and computers became the richest and most frenetic source of “nerbs.” Totally new verbs grew out directly from the names of such new technologies as the telephone, photocopier, fax machine, and e-mail. Thus, practically all English speakers now use such highly efficient nerbing shortcuts as “They telephoned [phoned] me just now,” “She photocopied the contract,” “My assistant will fax you the document tonight,” and “I’ll e-mail you the file tomorrow.”

The developers of these new technologies themselves have been prodigiously creating nerbs to describe new technical procedures and processes: “You must firewall your computer to protect your system from hackers and spammers.” “Please refer to this manual to architect your new portal server-based dynamic workplace.” Management and industry have likewise been riding on this trend by using such nouns as “conference,” “leverage,” “impact,” and “office” into verbs that some grammarians find deplorable, as in “They’ll conference out of town next week” and “She now offices at home for convenience.”

Some language observers fear that direct noun-to-verb conversion has become such a serious syndrome in English, one that promotes confusion instead of understanding among its users. As Sir Kingsley Amis, the late English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, had observed about the phenomenon, “There are times when this sort of verb seems to be growing too fast for comfort, and one suspects that now may be such a time…[Such verbs] may be quicker to say, but then cutting your arm off will reduce your weight faster and more irreversibly than any diet or exercise.”

It is highly unlikely that the nerbing syndrome can be stopped, however, but we can at least help prevent inappropriate nerbs from swamping English by using usefulness and aesthetics as criteria for evaluating nerbs before using them ourselves. This way, only those that foster brevity as well as accuracy and clarity to language can survive and become welcome entries to the English lexicon. (December 05, 2005)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 5, 2005, © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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Previously Featured Essay:

Too much boasting and nestling in

If I were to judge from my newspaper, magazine, and web readings in recent years, it would appear that we are not only a most boastful people but also one so predisposed to petty exaggeration in our language. This is strongly evident in our glib overuse of two English expressions, “boast of [something]” and “nestled [in],” particularly in newspaper and magazine journalism, in advertising, and in the tourist literature.

Let’s talk about “boast of [something]” first. Its dictionary definition is, of course, “to puff oneself up in speech,” “to speak of or assert with excessive pride,” or “to possess and call attention to a source of pride.” Of course, it can also simply mean “to have” or “to contain”—the unboastful denotation that’s actually what is meant in many “boast of” statements.

Now, from Google’s estimated 775,000 citations* of what are “boasted about” in the Philippines, the following representative high-level boasts are perhaps semantically justifiable and factually defensible: “the Philippines boasts of some of the best beaches and scuba diving waters in the world,” “the Philippines boasts of a 94 percent literacy rate,” “the Philippines boasts [of] good English-language skills,” and “the Philippines boasts [of] some of the finest IT workers in the world.” Even so, if I were the drumbeater for these things, I’d be more circumspect and use “has” or “lays claim to” instead of “boasts of.” After all, levelheaded language often works much better than rank exaggeration in promotional talk of this kind.

Indeed, many of our boastings captured by Google are woefully out of proportion to the semantic enthusiasm expended on them: “Mindanao boasts of two new vapor heat treatment plants,” “[The library] boasts of a wealthy collection of multi-media materials on governance, productivity, and management,” “[The city] boasts of the first community-based breast screening program in RP,” “Domestic air travel market in Philippines boasts of a growth rate of 47 per cent,” and “One of the oldest in the province, this church boasts of a huge mural painting on its ceiling…” I think “boasts of” is out of line in all of these statements; the verb “has” could have done a much better job.

Now let’s talk about the terribly overused expression “nestled [in],” which means “settled snugly or comfortably” or “lying in a sheltered manner.” Google lists 288,000 citations for this expression in the Philippines alone, and when I looked at a representative sampling, I got the dreadful feeling that the expression is not only overused but subjected to severe semantic abuse as well.

Of course, there’s no doubt that the use of “nestled [in]” is semantically justified in these statements: “Nestled deep in the Cordilleras is Banaue, about nine hours from Baguio by bus,” “The first and only pine estate south of Metro Manila, [it] is a quiet sanctuary nestled in the gently rolling hills of Tagaytay,” and “Nestled atop a beachside cliff, [the resort] offers breathtaking views of the ocean from the balcony of your own private villa.” The sense of curling up comfortably and of restfulness is evident in all of these three statements.

But I think the writers had gone overboard in using “nestled [in]” in these highly contrived statements: “The Philippines lies nestled in the bosom of the East Asian growth area,” “Nestled in the center of everything worth the while, [the hotel] is located along Manila’s Roxas Boulevard fronting the Manila Bay,” “…the sophistication and elegance of a hotel [that’s] nestled right at the heart of Cebu’s bustling business district,” and “Taal Volcano—the word’s smallest volcano [that] is nestled in the middle of a scenic lake.”

Obviously, we can’t force everything to nestle into just anything for the sake of lending drama to our language. Instead of settling for a semantic near-miss, therefore, why not use a no-nonsense word like “lies,” “located” or “situated” instead? It will be right on the mark all the time. (August 23, 2008)
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*For some unknown reason, Google’s 775,000 citations for “boast of” in the Philippines on August 20, 2008 have dropped to 54,000 as of January 28, 2010.

** For some unknown reason, Google’s 288,000 citations for “nestled in” in the Philippines on August 20, 2008 have dropped to 70,400 as of January 28, 2010.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 23, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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