verbalize it . . .

I've been thinking about this business of turning nouns into verbs. Have you noticed it? Do you do it? Do you think it's a good idea.

I don't care for it, but it interests me that one word at a time seems to be the one chosen for this grammatical metamorphosis. The word of the moment is transition which has evolved (and I use that word loosely) into transitioning.

As a verb it can refer to something or someone that is undergoing change. I recall a parent discussing her 3-year-old child who invariably became cranky when it was time to leave pre-school. She said "Lauren loves pre-school and she's happy to be home but she has trouble transitioning." Maybe she said it that way because she didn't want her kid to hear her say "Lauren is an infernal little demon in the car on the way home."

Yesterday on an NPR news item, an earnest woman used the word transitioning in the same sentence three times: twice as a verb, once as a noun. Frequently now when someone leaves a job (or loses a job more likely) he or she is described as transitioning rather than being out of work.

I first noticed this phenomenon in the 1970's. That decade's memorable noun to verb transformation was parent to parenting. When I was a kid mothers and fathers raised their children - or if they were really stodgy, they reared them. About the time I was graduating from high school and slithering out of the parental clutches, they were all set to begin parenting. That may have been a bullet I dodged.

In the 1980's it was impact which frequently looks the same whether it be noun or verb. (Now do you see why learning English makes people crazy?) Once in a while someone will say impacting.

I don't remember a specific noun to verb metamorphosis for the 1990s. What I remember from those years is the gratuitous repetition of is before that in a sentence. "The trouble is is that I don't like brussels sprouts." My theory is that people heard Bill Clinton utter that immortal question (maybe a slight paraphrase) "It depends on what the meaning of is is," and we were off and running.

Thirty-five years ago, a group of linguists set out to measure the speed at which a new element of language was adopted generally within a population. It was a "rough and ready" field experiment. A group of grad students set out to introduce the expression "in a pushcart" into colloquial English. The phrase didn't mean anything until they decided to use it as a slang term meaning the same thing as the expression "having one's ass in a sling." Three or four of these students began introducing it subtly in casual conversation without any explanation. Four days, later, one of them was standing in line at the supermarket and heard the checker use it in conversation with a customer as she was punching prices into the cash register. That's how quickly a weird and meaningless variation can creep into the language.