- "Bagel me, please."
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- My daughter wasn't asking someone to perform an extreme
chiropractic procedure with those words. She was simply asking me to pass
her a bagel, in emulation of Homer Simpson's, "Beer me."
-
- Beyond that, her request signalled the movement of verbing
from boardrooms and cartoons into the public domain.
-
- And my kitchen.
-
- Before we finished breakfasting, she had been toastered,
plated, knifed and cream-cheesed.
-
- Her verbifying didn't red flag me at the time. It was
largely funning around, gaming the language. But then it hit me. Here she
was, havocing the Queen's English, right in the presence of a professional
writer.
-
- For 30 some years, I have earned my living by togethering
words into sentences, and verbifying is nothing new to me.
-
- But was this mere verbification, or a signal that the
language is systematically being verbicided?
-
- In my professional life, my alarm bells have gone off
when I've seen the corporate and bureaucratic worlds jargonize our language.
There is something unseemly about such a dangerously cavalier attitude
to our daily discourse.
-
- When I was still a rookie writer, I remember being lectured
by a veteran to avoid sentences such as: "How are the cuts to welfare
impacting low-income families?"
-
- "Impact is a noun, it is not a verb," she hectored
me.
-
- Well, guess what? Three decades later, impact is a verb.
I lifted the above example directly from my Canadian Oxford, albeit with
this disclaimer: "Although some people object to these uses of impact,
they are well established in both spoken and written English and are perfectly
acceptable."
-
- But I tangentize. Our English language has evolutionized
since Chaucer's time. And my daughter's verbing was merely progressing
the language in the same manner that companies talk of growing their business
or ramping up production to transition to a new paradigm. Actually, companies
rarely talk any more -- they dialogue with customers.
-
- And workers don't work any more, they task. Sometimes
they multi-task, especially after the company has computerized. In some
cases, companies don't even have a staff any more because the workload
has been outsourced.
-
- And in the networked part of the world, who among us
hasn't googled?
-
- As the business world continues trending toward verbification,
it is dragging other parts of the world along with it. At my daughter's
high school graduation, students received awards for keyboarding, a skill
which has apparently obsoleted typing.
-
- My concern about this trend softened as I recalled an
example from my own childhood, when I would triumphantly move a checker
into our opponent's end of the board to proclaim: "King me!"
-
- But just as I was starting to believe that this trend
might be harmless, my local newspaper blindsided me with this example "He
cheapshotted me," and my television revealed that Ashton Kutcher had
punked (or Punk'd) another unwitting celebrity.
-
- Do these verbifications cross the line, or simply move
the line?
-
- My investigation revealed a rich history of verbicize.
Finalize, theorize and prioritize -- deemed suspect more than a century
ago -- have made the cut without causing us more than minor discomfort
in the 21st century. Few of us would, however, would lament the loss of
excursionize, pulpitize or sororize.
-
- Likewise, the world may be a better place without sultanize,
sensize, dissocialize or soberize from an 1873 list of questionable verbs.
We are still awaiting the verdict on some more recent verbifications: laymanize,
impossibilize, disasterize, explitize, incentize and prominentize, and
even Colorado-ize, which apparently means to get ready to go backpacking
in the mountains.
-
- Turns out that the -ize suffix has been noun-ized and
adjective-ized for almost as long as English has been written down. In
fact, had he known what his proclamation was going to unleash, Henry V
might never have championed our written language in 1417 when he abruptly
switched his official correspondence from French to English.
-
- We have to expect some glitching in the 600-year history
of a language. And we have to realize that bureaucracies and businesses
continue to lexicate new words routinely. So I will continue to bagel my
daughter and learn to accept that verbifying will never be effectively
verbotenized.
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- - Wayne Drury lives in Winnipeg.
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- © 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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- http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040220/FACTS20/
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