Who needs verbs when you've got nouns?

At the start of my career, my editor in The Associated Press bureau in New Orleans would leave little notes for me critiquing my work on the overnight shift.

One I recall: "Is 'host' a verb?" Maybe. What about critiquing in the first sentence? Maybe.

Anthony Gardner explores the growing use of nouns as verbs.

Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.

No trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon.

New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist, he writes.

We “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.

Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new.

Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

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