Wednesday 21 August 2019

Turning nouns into verbs

Further to my post about the changing use of tenses in English, I've recently noticed another trend of turning nouns into verbs, often with a tweaked meaning.

One well known example is "to ghost somebody", which now seems widespread, and I only had to notice a headline on the BBC website the other day to realise I was about to learn another. The afore-mentioned headline read as follows, "How to tell if you're being breadcrumbed at work", and a quick spot of googling (a proper noun that's become a verb in itself!) soon explained the origin of the term.

The obvious question, of course, is just what exactly "to poetry somebody" might end up meaning....

1 comment:

  1. Yes, it makes me cringe when I hear nouns turned into verbs. For example, a recent commercial relayed "Brain Better" to promote a pill that would help you think better. Why not say to "think better" or to "retain more information" take this pill.

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