My Globe colleague Sam Allis has an old-fashioned language rant in today's paper, hating on some verbings (old fave impact, '70s invention transition, recent revivals caveat and friend). His rousing conclusion: "Just because people ... are using 'unfriend' as a verb doesn't mean we all have to sink with them."
Really, Sam, has all my work been in vain? Of course that's what it means. I'm going to put this down to deadline pressure, an excuse I can totally get behind. But let's try not to make the world an even dumber place, OK?
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Well gee, I refuse to use Google as a verb.
Tudza, I hope Google will reward you for observing its trademark preferences. I Google all the time. Well, sometimes we say "ask Mr. Google" instead ...
"Intolerable", "ugly", "abomination"... Language usage doesn't seem to be the problem here so much as the scapegoat. And why does the NYT Magazine's "Its usage note" appear with an unnecessary apostrophe: "It’s usage note"?
Not a helpful article, and its tone doesn't make it enjoyable to read.
If I've got it straight, the first person to use "google" as a verb was Google co-founder Larry Page.
See here.
Verbing weirds language! I recently had a school principal ask, in a letter, that parents "conference" with their child's teacher.
I would say that there is a reasonable difference in the meanings of confer and conference (v.).
Verbing weirds do not always language.
As John Lawler says: Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
As a former Google employee, I can tell you that Googlers talk about googling all the time, and the word they use for it is "googling".
How did you do it? I want to be a recovering nitpicker, too!
I want to be the kind of person who doesn't care when folks write "I should of done it" or "your too fussy," or say "irregardless," or "him and I went to the store," or even "he and I's trip was canceled" (I heard that just this week).
But I do care! I know language evolves, and I say things like "hopefully the sun will come out" and "let's be proactive about this"--things that others might find as awful as the examples I listed above.
So not only am I still a nitpicker, but apparently I am a hypocritical one as well.
Please tell me how you recovered!
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