Like more than a million other Americans, one of the first things I read every morning is a daily email from “Wordsmith.org,” the brainchild of a guy named Anu Garg.
Wordsmith.org is an online community comprising word lovers from an estimated 200 countries. Garg, an Indian-American author and speaker, was born in rural India. The only language he knew was Hindi, and he did not see a library until college.
According to Google, “His schooling took place under a mango tree, his classroom consisting of a few broken sticks of chalk and a blackboard made by painting a flat piece of wood with soot.” So it’s pretty amazing that Garg has become such a word aficionado.
The daily email is called “A Word A Day,” and that’s basically what it is, the exploration of a word a day, usually chosen to fit a theme. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the words all had something to do with “hands” and included words whose derivations were related. Well, anyway, word-enthusiast that I am, I enjoy my daily visits from Anu.
A couple of years ago, after I’d done one of my occasional ventures into the wonderful world of words, I got a personal email from Anu, which said, “Keep up the good work on words!” I wrote back and asked where he’d read my column, because he lives in Seattle. He wrote back that a “mutual friend” had sent it to him. And that comprises the entire extent of our correspondence. I have no idea who our mutual friend is. Six degrees of separation?
All of this explanation is because a recent week’s collection of words was all about verbs. I love verbs. Garg began the week with a quotation from author Terry Tempest Williams: “This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.”
And then Garg says, “Williams said it well. Verbs make sentences come alive. Verbs are the words, literally, from Latin verbum (word).”
I have written several columns in the last 10 or 12 years that concerned verbs. In one of them, I wrote about our tendency to “verbify” words to make up new (usually unnecessary) verbs out of nouns. (You’ll notice I just did it in the previous sentence. I’m quite certain “verbify” is not a real word. Or at least it wasn’t until just now!)
In a 2007 column, I used the example of a police report in our local paper that said a car had been “paintballed.” You take a noun, paintball, and “verb” it by adding a past tense suffix. In that column, I said this: “I can’t be sure, but I think “verbing” as a term came from a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon quite a few years ago when Calvin said to Hobbs: ‘Verbing weirds language.’”
How often have you used “googled” or “photoshopped” or “emailed”? I once read a poem by an anonymous poet, which said: “Our language is an enigma/ In how its words are used;/ And that is why, in verbing nouns,/ We ought to be excused.”
Well, maybe so, but perhaps some things should not be allowed. Or maybe they should? Am I “waffling” here? Maybe that’s why our language is so vibrant. After all, that’s one of the ways a language grows. So who am I to buck the trend? Calvin’s idea that “Verbing weirds language” is true only if you’re expecting language to work in a simple way. But the English language is not simple. Just ask a non-native speaker about that!
Perhaps the more general truth is that verbing doesn’t weird language; instead maybe language weirds us!
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