We have seen that a word can have more than one meaning. In the pun about the cow showing its approval with a pat on the head, the word pat refers either to a mild physical gesture or to a giant cake of ordure. And though it happens that in both these cases pat is deployed as a noun, a single word may also be put to more than one grammatical use: pat, for example, is, among other things, a verb as well. A widely cited humorous line that depends on this great flexibility in the language is: ‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana’. How you read the phrase ‘fruit flies like a banana’ is determined by the grammatical category you ascribe to the words fruit, flies and like; flies, for instance, can be read either as a verb—as in, ‘it flies through the air’, or as a noun—‘those pesky buzzing flies’.**
The earliest surviving examples in English of uses of the word fly show it employed in both capacities. It occurs as a noun, the insect, in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and in Beowulf, as a verb, where a naked, flame-wreathed dragon ‘flies’ through the night. These two texts appear to be of much the same date; but often in English a word will start life as one class of word, say a noun, and only later—perhaps much later—begin to be used as another, say a verb, in a process linguists call ‘word-class conversion’. Sticking for a moment with animals, the nouns fox, ape, badger, fish and dog took years, and in some cases centuries, to become verbs as well (to fox, to ape, to badger, to fish, to dog). Or take the word cloud. This too started out—in the ninth century—as a noun. It first meant a pile of rocks or a hill (cloud is etymologically related to both clod and clot). Then around 1300, clouds lifted off the ground to become heaps in the sky—since when the noun has always meant what we mean by it now. But it was not until the sixteenth century that cloud was also converted into a verb, meaning to ‘darken’ or ‘obscure’. Shakespeare took the noun blanket, then three centuries old, and turned it into a verb in King Lear: ‘My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins’. The word fund, a noun from the seventeenth century, became a verb a century later, as in this remark from 1785: ‘they will fund the debt of one country and destroy the trade of another’**—and so it goes on. Words are converted from verbs to nouns, too. For instance, the verb to walk came before the noun walk, as in ‘Let’s go for a walk’; and the verb to think came before the noun think, as in ‘I’ll have a little think about it’. In fact, converting in both directions is commonplace.
So far, so good, you may be saying to yourself—though if you are, you would be wrong. John Humphrys, in Lost for Words, writes that, in English, ‘verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed—but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life’. He can have had no idea when he said this of the apocalypse he was wishing on the language. More specifically, Kingsley Amis listed the use of fund as a verb among what he called ‘easily avoidable blemishes’, apparently in the belief that it was a recent example of conversion. Martin Amis later concluded that his father’s view in this had been fogeyish—but immediately described another ‘blemish’ on his father’s list, the verb to critique, as genuinely ‘regrettable’.** The Economist Style Guide almost pettishly agrees: ‘critique is a noun. If you want a verb, try criticise’.
You may be wondering what exactly the problem is here. Gripers cling to the idea that some words, or some uses of words, can be written off as horrible mostly because they are new, and therefore, by implication, redundant (nobody needed them before). Leaving aside the question of whether or not any part of this argument is valid, it is worth observing that lack of an ear for such things, and the will to check in a dictionary, means that those who shoot this line often mistake the age of what it is they are wishing to abolish.** No doubt there are entire armies of ‘regretters’ who would condemn as repulsive modern business-speak the verbs to message, dialogue, routine, conference, and so on. Yet, as the OED shows, these words were all first converted from nouns to verbs either decades or centuries ago. To conference dates from 1846 and would be used by Thomas Carlyle: ‘There was of course long conferencing, long consulting’. To routine dates from 1844 and would be used by George Bernard Shaw: ‘he underplays them, or routines them mechanically in the old stock manner’. To dialogue dates from 1595. It was used by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens: ‘Dost Dialogue with thy shadow?’ And to message dates from 1582, later used by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge: ‘lettering, and messaging, and fetching and carrying’. Even to text, which sounds modern for obvious reasons, was first attempted in English as long ago as 1564, when the physician William Bullein wrote, ‘Texte how they will texte, I will trust none of them all’.
Just as there are verbs converted from nouns about which the grumblers will grumble, so there are nouns converted from verbs that go down badly with those easily disturbed by what they find unusual. They might breeze past a defunct literary example, as when in Paradise Lost Milton uses disturb itself as a noun: ‘Instant without disturb they took Allarm’. They might never stop to think of all the work on this pattern done by Shakespeare, who is credited with giving us, among others, a scuffle and a gust of wind, not to mention the dawn. But new instances, or what are taken to be new instances, generate much huffing and puffing—an ask, a relax, government spend. The commentator Robert Hartwell Fiske, particularly extreme in his views, declares that any reference to ‘a disconnect’, the noun, ‘is to be reviled’, and that ‘All further development of this word produces only grotesqueries’:** it must be satisfying to be so sure. Yet there is always the chance that what at first seems peculiar will bed in, or that what is deemed unpleasant in one context is welcome in another. When, for example, the verb to fail is presented as a noun in the newish expression ‘epic fail’, it is deemed by gripers to be what it names. Yet in the expression ‘without fail’, fail as a noun is accepted in just the way the phrase describes.
Huffing and puffing about conversion is nothing new. In the course of a delightful correspondence between the struggling eighteenth-century literary couple Elizabeth and Richard Griffith, Elizabeth Griffith reports to her husband on criticism of his writing style by ‘Mr. —’, a first-class griper: ‘that you frequently take too much Liberty with the English Language; using Words often, in a different Sense, from the common Acceptation of them; running Nouns into Verbs, and turning Verbs into Nouns again; to the Confusion of all Grammar’.**
It might appear from all this that in your attempt to undermine the edifice that is Good English, it would be an idea to follow Richard Griffith’s example. Feel free—except, why limit yourself to using nouns and verbs? There are other ways to go about word-class conversion as well. For a gangster to off a rival may sound slangy, as a verb converted from an adverb; yet people have being ‘offing’ in one way or another for centuries. And after all, on the same pattern, without grammatical fuss, one can up the stakes and down tools or a drink; while to out, with many meanings, goes back over a thousand years. Another redoubtable verb converted from an adverb is to atone, derived from at one. As for nouns converted from adverbs, what about the ins and outs? No griper likes the verb to diss, shortened from disrespect, in effect a verb made out of a prefix.** Yet the unexceptionable verb to bus (‘they were bussed out of the hurricane zone’) is on paper even less likely, made by truncating the Latin case-ending, the dative plural -ibus, that forms the back end of the word omnibus, ‘for all’. Some will object to what they interpret as an adjective used as an adverb, as in ‘she sang beautiful’ rather than beautifully, though this habit is widespread and entrenched.** A verb recently converted from an adjective will strike others as equally debased, as here: ‘Being “favourited” is a key index within the space that signals success’.** Again, however, to tidy is a perfectly acceptable verb, made by the Victorians from an adjective that had until then survived unconverted for five hundred years. On adjectives, the condemned expression ‘the new normal’ converts an adjective into a noun; so too does the use of verbals to refer to spoken nastiness: ‘Public humiliation on the streets often results in verbals, pushing and arrest’ (Guardian). Paul C. Berg included in his 1953 Dictionary of New Words in English the use of lovely as a noun, though lovelies had been celebrated in English from the fifteenth century on. The derided but increasingly popular job title a ‘creative’ follows the same pattern. But are those who flinch at creatives comparably repelled by locals, professionals, executives and experts? Presumably not—though if any professional were to speak of that bugbear the ‘key deliverable’, the flinching would doubtless begin all over again.
These examples may make conversion seem like a free-for-all, but there are trends within the general practice that are considered particularly loathsome. Lewis Carroll, in ‘Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur’, a ditty of 1869 explaining how to write pretentious poems, advised ‘That abstract qualities begin / With capitals alway: / The True, the Good, the Beautiful— / Those are the things that pay!’ This advice sounds quaintly harmless today because we have abstract ‘things’ that pay so very much more. Take a few nouns ending with -tion, -sion, -cion, etc.—take, for instance, a solution, derived from solve; a suspicion, from suspect; a decision, from decide; and an acquisition, from acquire: all these abstractions are themselves regularly converted back into verbs, not least in the commercial English found in reports, pamphlets and advertisements:
Try this, try that, keep thinking of different ways to solution the problem …
When a supervisor has difficulty in getting his employees to help each other, he should suspicion several things.
To expedite your review please begin to gather the following documents we will need to decision your loan for any of the options listed above.
Several Reasons You Need to Acquisition Vapor Cigarette Kits.
The gripers will groan that there is no conceivable need for the hideous verb to decision when we already have decide. But quite apart from anything else, to say this is to ignore the way in which supposedly redundant words can acquire nuance. Anyone uncertain of the difference between to proposition and to propose has but to reflect on the fate of Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Another trend akin to word-class conversion, and one with great potential to cause dismay among our advisers, is the use of nouns in place of adjectives,** especially several in a string, forming what The Economist Style Guide calls a ‘ghastly adjectival reticule’.** Not only will all good gripers find annoying in itself a headline such as the BBC’s ‘Ski trip death girl chair-lift probe’ (a headline the broadcaster, on reflection, radically altered), but they will point out that this kind of writing can sometimes lead to confusion. Consider the heading on a leaflet produced by the Stagecoach bus company in 2012 to alert passengers to a change in its rural routes: ‘Bus Stops Moving’. Any passenger accidentally reading bus stops as a noun and a verb, and not a noun modifying a noun, must have been taken aback at the needless frankness of the disclosure. In speech, a speaker’s stress patterns, and on the page, a writer’s punctuation, will sometimes clarify what would otherwise be ambiguous. With commas, the much-cited line ‘nut, screws, washers and bolts’ is a list of ironmongery; without them, screws and bolts become verbs, and this suddenly sounds like the headline of a crime report—as it reputedly once was. But what of the following headline from the Guardian, which partly quotes from the article it summarises: ‘Let’s see some babyboomer rage about Generation Jobless’? This either means ‘Let’s see some (unspecified individual) babyboomer [noun] rage [verb] about X’, or ‘Let’s see some (unspecified quantity of) babyboomer rage [noun modifying a noun] about X’. Hyphenating ‘babyboomer-rage’ would tell you that it was the second, but as professional writers do not dependably care for hyphens nowadays, the lack of a hyphen cannot be taken to guarantee that it was the first.
This potential for double meaning can be put to clever use, as it is in the name chosen for the military charity Combat Stress. With combat as a noun modifier by one reading and a verb by another, the title tells you both the difficulty the organisation seeks to address, and what it hopes to do about it. Yet pithier is the name of the feminist organisation Object, where the title oscillates between presenting itself as a noun, the original use in English of this word, and—what it then also became—a verb.
Obviously it would be hypocritical to ‘object’ to object’s having been verbified (to use a Victorian term for this process). But of all the forms of conversion mentioned above, it is verbifying, or the magicking-up of new verbs out of existing words, that grates on the nerves of the gripers the most. The Economist Style Guide says ‘avoid’, and, ‘Do not force nouns or other parts of speech to act as verbs’. Simon Heffer lands an even dirtier blow with: ‘this seems to have become an especially American habit’.
Forget Swift, who, weighing up the attempts of the writer Richard Steele to make The Spectator more appealing to women, wrote that the results were no improvement, ‘let him fair-sex it to the world’s end’.** Forget Dickens, who in Great Expectations depicts a desperate Mr Pocket saying, ‘Are infants to be nutcrackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?’ As confirmed greats, Swift and Dickens are no doubt automatically forgiven their lexical crimes. But not so the rest of us. When Elizabeth Griffith reported to her husband the views of ‘Mr. —’, she mentioned a cruel further point made by this unnamed critic on the subject of Richard Griffith’s habit of ‘using Words often, in a different Sense, from the common Acceptation of them’: ‘He said that this was trop Hazardé, (his own Expression) and presuming, for any Writer, who had not already established a Character, sufficient to be his own Authority’.
Well now, let us say that you have not yet established a Character sufficient to be your own Authority either. Fear not! This is no barrier (far from it) to your attempting to impact Good English by progressing one or two of the horrible uses detailed in this chapter.** And if you are bold enough to go a step further, you could try to convert—or even to conversion**—a few words of your own. The electrified griper will endeavour relentlessly to nutcracker your babies into their tombs. But stick with it, routine the process, and who knows? You may just help to make the ghastly reticules of Good English that little bit plumper.