Who is responsible for the latest virus of 'verbing' nouns? I know I'm not because I never say "Google this" or "Mapquest that" although I am more than capable of looking up something using Google and finding an address on Mapquest...Someone once told me she 'Amtraked' from Syracuse to New York...Ugh!!!I felt like killing her but couldn't because she was a friend...So, why do people do it? Is it an American trend? Does it make English simpler to understand?Should the rules for grammar and punctuation change with time?
My grammar is not very good and I am not going to win any awards for it, but it irritates me when people say things like "I love scrap booking" and "just Google it"...People these days are easily promiscuous with nouns and verbs - morphing them one way or the other to suit their language needs...This is especially true when writing or talking about new things, things that have no roots in language or our collective psyche...I think the rapidly changing world of technology is partly to blame because any new 'invention' always takes us by surprise and when we are surprised we conjure up words like 'download' and 'blogging' to fill the gaps...
Who decides which nouns can become verbs?Can only nouns that reflect new trends be turned into verbs?I don't know,do you?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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