Verbification is the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective, or other word. Sometimes, a verbified word becomes so commonly used, we don't even notice it didn't start as a verb - mail and sleep are both examples of this.
However, sometimes, especially in IT, verbification creates neologisms and jargon. For example, today I heard "goaled" and "incentivize" within 5 minutes of one-another in a presentation. "Goaled" was particularly confusing to some of the audience. It is a heterograph with "gold", and it would have been consistent with the context for the presenter to say "evaluated" or "measured".
I guess this is a good example why Calvin said "verbing weirds languages"
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lol, I hope the presenter doesn't read this blog :-)
ReplyDeleteI was just dialoging about this at work.
ReplyDelete@ anon - Don't worry, no one reads this blog.
ReplyDeleteIt's not dialoging, it's "conversating"
ReplyDelete"we can solution that"
ReplyDelete