Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Caught in an television commercial this morning, the expression “your next quit”, referring to your next attempt to quit smoking. Fair number of occurrences of this expression on the web, for example:

To make your next quit the last, learn everything you can about the process — yes, quitting is a process — before you take your last puff. (link)

The same site also has “My Quit Place”  and “every quit attempt”.

The nouning quit isn’t new — the OED (draft revision of December 2007) has cites from 1918 on — but this use seems like a specialization of the sense given by the OED (where it’s marked as U.S.):

The action or an instance of quitting, spec. of leaving a job or of departing a place. Also a person who quits.

This entry was posted on December 13, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under Conversion, Morphology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.