Verb This!
This promises to be a fun entry--one part fun tidbit about the kids, one part nerd-fest. Here goes:
Some people in my line of work have a real gripe with turning nouns into verbs (there was a tussle a while back about how to say that someone used a Taser on someone else--do you tase a person or Taser a person?). I see the virtue here, as academics are adept at making perfectly good words like normal and Balkan into ugly things like normalize and Balkanize. It can get messy when institutionalize becomes a standard part of your vocabulary.
But making verbs from everyday things can be fun:
- To Dizz--Made by a young Allyson to describe the process of becoming dizzy. I think she heard us say "You're dizzy" and thought it was "You're dizzing." She then back-formed the base of her new verb.
- To Jammy--A sort of shorthand meaning to put pajamas on, this verb is typically combined with up, as in, "It's time to jammy up."
- To Binky--To give a baby his/her pacifier. This verb was born at 3 am when one of our kids lost the binky and started crying. At that hour, it was easier to say, "I'll go binky the baby" than the unwieldy "I'll go give the baby his binky." Efficiency is the mother of linguistic invention.
- To Dissertate--This one grew out of my recent renewed emphasis on writing my dissertation, and means simply "to write actual dissertation content." My goal, with which I slipped a bit this week, is to dissertate for an hour each day.
1 comment:
Sorry to blogstalk but I just hopped over here from the Bushman's blog and started cracking up when I read this. So clever and so true. I've found that kids, and many adults, also have a hard time conjugating words as well. Not that I'm any exception. The best I've ever heard was when I heard someone say they "squooze" it. At first it's strange, foreign, and so wrong but later I found myself accidentally using it. I mean say it to yourself. It's funny but almost makes sense.
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