Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Verbing Weirds Language

Verbification, or verbing is the turning of perfectly good nouns into perfectly awful and unnecessary verbs. Corporate America is the worst culprit. Instead of providing incentives, years ago companies began to incentivize. Now they talk about the dangers of disincentivizing.

When I arrive at airports these days I am deplaned. At restaurants, my food gets plated (I wonder why my drinks aren't cupped or my soup bowled). People used to engage in dialogue. Now they just dialogue. Friends no longer enjoy fellowship, they simply fellowship (this one bugs me in particular because the suffix -ship is meant to denote a noun). A short time ago, access was something you could gain. Now it's commonly something you do. Same with impact. You used to have an impact. Now you can simply impact something.

Okay, it's true that verbification can be a legitimate way for language to evolve and grow. You can argue that access, for example, is a useful addition to the language. I can live with that. And popular verbification has given us verbs like mail, strike, salt, pepper, switch, sleep, ship, train, stop, drink, cup, lure, mutter, dress, divorce, fool, and merge.

But these words are not only convenient and useful, they are pleasing to the ear. Throwing an -ize, -ing, or -ate onto a noun form is almost always ugly and unnecessary. Here are some examples of useless, discordant business verbing:

concretize (We concretized the design.)
rightsize (Stan lost his job when HQ rightsized last May.)
actioning (Don't pester me, I'm actioning the strategy.)
anonymize (Before you submit our proposal, you might want to anonymize it.)
monetize (The plan looks good, but let's monetize it first.)
solutioning (What this department needs is some solutioning.)
leveraging (We need to leverage our core competencies.)

And, yes, I am aware that to verbify and to verb are themselves examples of verbification. It's an intentional irony--get it?

An old Calvin and Hobbes strip dealt with this issue and concluded with the brilliant line: "Verbing weirds language."

(Thanks to David Sims for this post idea.)

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