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, but without changing in any way the form of the noun. This direct noun-to-verb conversion, which has been taking place since language began, has given English such basic action verbs as “eye” for “to watch or study closely,” “nose” for “to search impertinently,” “face” for “to deal with straightforwardly,” and “stomach” for “to bear without overt resentment.”
So rather than come up with a new word for the action that a body part typically can do literally or figuratively, the early English speakers simply made that body part stand for the action itself and later on for tools, machines, and technologies themselves. By this process, an estimated one-fifth of all English verbs had been formed from nouns.
Creating verbs this way—some language observers facetiously call it “nerbing”—is particularly tempting because it saves time for the speaker or writer and simplifies sentence construction. Rather than saying “She
made a catalogue of the books,” for instance, we can use the noun “catalogue” as the verb itself and say “She
catalogued the books” instead. And 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 and say “The wealthy couple
parented the orphan until she reached legal age.” This process saves on words and enriches English with a “nerb”—a synthetic term that we’ll use here simply for convenience.
Traditionally, jobs and the professions and occupations have been the most prolific generators and users of English nerbs: “He
mentored the student in the art of debating.” “The unscrupulous accountant
doctored the corporate books.” “The government legal counsel secretly
lawyered for the powerful political family.”
Scientific, medical, and manufacturing processes also tend 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 these 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.”
During the past few decades, of course, advances in computer and information technology became the richest and most frenetic source of “nerbs.” Totally new verbs grew out directly from the names of such modern 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.”
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 when
architecting your new portal server-based dynamic workplace.” Management and industry have likewise been riding on this trend by turning such nouns as “conference,” “leverage,” and “impact” into verbs that some grammarians find deplorable, as in “They’ll
conference out of town next week.”
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. As Sir Kingsley Amis, the late English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, had observed, “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’s highly unlikely that the nerbing syndrome can be stopped, though, 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.
Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in
The Manila Times:
The noun-to-verb conversion syndrome This essay, 2146th of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the April 13, 2023 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.(Next:
Using appositives for texture and depth) April 20, 2023
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
