Joe.
Upon reading your "Verbs into Nouns" piece, it occurred to me to ask: How can you reconcile your following statement:
I can appreciate why some English speakers like you and Max Sims find it more reassuring and predictable to use “gut feeling” than “gut feel.” It really depends on one’s communication milieu and language register. In my case, however, having worked in communication management for over two-and-a-half decades, I can assure you that in business and management circles, “gut feel” has greater currency—meaning it’s more idiomatic—than “gut feeling.” This is why I strongly feel I must stand my ground on my usage of “gut feel.”with your previous statement:
Still, I think it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to letters and other forms of written communication, whether formal or informal. In such cases, I think using “invite” as a noun is nothing less than a grammatical outrage; in fact, whenever I get a formal invitation that uses “invite” as a noun instead of as a verb, my estimation of the quality of the English of the message source plunges several notches lower—and the temptation to decline the invitation becomes almost irresistible to me.
Admittedly, the former is to do with a noun becoming a verb, and the latter is to do with a verb becoming a noun, but what the heck - is not the principle the same? If one is an outrage, why not the other?
In any case, why the concern over verbs becoming nouns and vice versa? This has been happening for centuries. The last one to attract my attention is "commute", meaning a regular short journey. Now
that is an outrage!
There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of English words that serve as both noun
and verb, but no one seems to worry about it (except me when the US of Americans use the verb "permit" as a noun!
