Archive for the ‘Verbing’ Category
June 16, 2018
Yesteday’s hot news from my little corner of academia, a message from my Stanford linguistics colleague Beth Levin announcing that
Dan Jurafsky … has just been appointed to an endowed chair, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professorship in the Humanities.
Margaret Jacks Hall was thronged with well-endowed celebrants bearing chairs and singing paeans to the law and the American banking system, bringing to conclusion not only the month of Ramadan but also an extraordinarily crowded season of doctoral debuts (some of which I will report on in other postings).
In the midst of this, excited buzz — like the murmuring of innumerable bees — over the verbing of chair in the sense (roughly) ‘to award a named professorship to’.
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Linguists, Stanford, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
March 27, 2018
I’ll start with the seasonally relevant compound verb to snow blow / snow-blow / snowblow and go on from there to an animus, in some quarters, against such V-headed compounds (on the grounds that they are unnecessary innovations, because the language already has syntactic means for expressing their meanings — in this case, to blow (the) snow away from).
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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Conversion, Idioms, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Morphology, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | 1 Comment »
December 23, 2017
A Xmas data-gift from Larry Horn, from a novel (Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You (2001)) about an affair between an undergraduate and her universty TA. The two excerpts Larry sent are, in his words,
separated by various (recoverable) activities, but the reader is expected to remember what had gone on between the lovers on pp. 93-94 [They kissed in the lit kitchen] when she gets to pp. 99-100 [They kitchen-kissed again].
So, in the latter: the verb to kitchen-kiss, either a 2pbfV (a 2-part back-formed V) based on the (well-attested) synthetic compound kitchen-kissing ‘kissing in the kitchen’ or a verbing of the (also well-attested) N + N compound kitchen-kiss ‘a kiss in the kitchen’. It turns out that kitchen-kissing and kitchen kisses are a (sociocultural) thing, which has attracted websites, Pinterest boards showing the activity, and the like — so it’s no surprise that there’s a one-word (compound) verb referring to the activity.
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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Pragmatics, Semantics, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
December 5, 2017
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:
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Ruthie’s taken the predicative idiom in cahoots (with) — Dad is in cahoots with Joe, Dad and Joe are in cahoots — and extracted from it (by back-formation) a noun cahoot, which she then verbs, to get an activity verb cahoot with rather than the stative be in cahoots with.
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Posted in Aksionsart, Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Verbing | 1 Comment »
November 13, 2017
It starts with an ordinary noun source and an ordinary verb sustain and eventually works its way to the adverb sustainably as a modifier of a verb source, strikingly in the split infinitive construction to sustainably source, which Wilson Gray reported in an ADS-L posting on the 11th, citing a General Mills ad in which to sustainably source oats figures prominently.
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Posted in Back formation, Derivation, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Split infinitives, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
July 3, 2017
Yesterday, from Chris Hansen, this cartoon by Daniel Beyer:
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Chris’s comment:
It took me a minute to “get” it (I’ve been in England for a looooong time)
(Chris is an American long resident in England.)
Another exercise in understanding comics. In this case, requiring a crucial piece of knowledge about American popular culture.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Dance, Folklore, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Pop culture, Understanding comics, Verbing | 1 Comment »
May 10, 2017
Today’s bon appétit top story, “Regional Potato Chips You’ve Never Heard Of”:
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Frito-Lay may rule most supermarket snack aisles, but once upon a time, regional potato chips dominated the American snacking scene. A visit to West Virginia wasn’t complete without a crunchy bag of Mister Bee. Headed to Ohio? Pick up a greasy handful of rippled Ballreich’s “Marcelled” chips. Many local titans aren’t the powerhouses they once were and countless others less fortunate have gone the way of the Marathon Bar, but their deep-fried legacy continues to bubble away on a smaller scale, thanks to online stores. Here are nine you should try, because there’s nothing more patriotic than supporting small businesses while stuffing your face with potato chips.
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
