Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Two cases of the verbing of composite nominals that have recently come past me:

Adj + N free ride > to free-ride  (1)

N + N fireside chat > to fireside chat  (2)

Now, verbing is all over the place, but these two are especially easy, because the head N of the source composite (bold-faced above) is in fact the nouning of a corresponding V (to ride > a ride; to chat > a chat), so that the verb is in a sense instantly available.

The sources:

for (1), from Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock, quoted by William D. Nordhaus in a review of that book, NYRB 6/4/15, p. 36:

Too few are going to do what is in the common interest. Everyone else free-rides.

for (2), Wilson Gray posting on ADS-L on 6/11/15 with the header of a notification he got in e-mail:

Are you going to fireside chat with A.R. Rahman – #RahmanAtGoogle tomorrow?

This entry was posted on June 12, 2015 at 5:34 am and is filed under Composites, Conversion, Verbings. 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.