Report on Facebook today from Sim Aberson (in South Florida) about his “daily constitutional” with his husband, where they encountered:
Copernicia macroglossa, petticoat palm, a very slow-growing species
Sim wrote:
When they eventually trunk, the old fronds produce a beautiful petticoat.
Yes, the noun trunk ‘stem of a tree’, verbed, to yield intransitive trunk ‘(of a tree) produce a trunk’.
For a moment, I thought that Sim had salted the verbing in there just for me to find — he knows my tastes — but then I realized that this is the way palm people talk (Sim and Mike are serious plant guys) — because the verb is a genuinely useful one for growers of palms.
An old story: people go around promiscuously nouning and verbing, occasionally for cleverness (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but usually because in one of their worlds — often a very specialized world — the innovative form is a good thing to have to hand.
