Chances are you didn’t cringe at the sight of those verbed nouns – because you’re used to them. You use them every single day. We all do. “The verbing of nouns is as old as the English language,” says Patricia O’Conner, author of Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. In fact, she says, experts estimate (not to be confused with the noun form ‘estimate’, which is pronounced differently) that 20% of all English verbs were originally nouns. And the phenomenon seems to be snowballing (there’s another one). Since 1900, says O’Conner, about 40% of all of our new verbs have come from nouns.

This is called denominalisation, which is the technical term for converting a noun to a verb. There are two ways to accomplish this conversion. You can either affix the noun with a suffix, like -ify, as in purify or clarify. Or you can do what we’ve been doing, and just steal a thing and do it. The name for the second option is zero derivation – because nothing is changed when the verb is derived from a noun in this way.

Too confusing? Let me Calvin and Hobbes it for you.

“I like to verb words,” Calvin tells Hobbes in a famous 1993 comic strip. “I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs,” he explains to his bemused tiger, citing the word “access.” “Remember when access was a thing? Now it’s something you do.”

His conclusion? “Verbing weirds language.”

Verbal blend

Fowler’s Modern English Usage notes that even though conversion is quite ubiquitous, plenty of grammarians object to the practice. Strunk and White, for example, in Elements of Style – the Bible for the use of American English ­– have this to say: “Many nouns lately have been pressed into service as verbs. Not all are bad, but all are suspect.” At which we all giggle because we suspect our favourite verbal curmudgeons are making a joke. The Chicago Manual of Style takes a similarly reluctant stance, advising writers to use verbs in this way “cautiously, if at all.”

Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief at Random House, says the when verbing happens, “we notice or we don’t. We either like the sound or we don’t.” That is, someone verbs a noun, and we let them continue their sentence, or we interrupt them with screams or threats of physical assault.