There is a habit, which seems worse in the US, of abusing the English language in business. One especially painful habit is that of verbing. Verbing is not a real world, but accurately describes and illustrates the habit of turning a noun or an adjective into a verb.
I heard someone the other day turn the already jargon laden adjective “blue sky” as in “blue sky research” into a verb as in “we blue skyed”. I hope I did not visibly wince.
One of the most commonly examples in the technology world is that the made-up known “Google” has become a verb, “I Googled it” now means to search on the Internet. I have found a memo on the net which turned consensus into a verb; “wouldn’t it be extremely important to get the operations people consensing with the… team” What makes this particularly bad is that the verb agree could have been used with the same meaning.
To be fair verbing has happened in English since at least the time of Shakespeare. However, it seems increasingly common and all to often used when there are plenty of simple words that would confer the meaning more effectively.
The last word on this subject belongs to the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbs “Verbing weirds the language”
And it can be colloquial, too. Have you spent any time in the south? Because, down he-yah, we polite y’all to death. You might even enjoy it.
elise
I wonder if the pleasure hearing a Southern accent would be enough to prevent me wincing at the use of polite as a verb. Although if any part of the English speaking world would find a need to use polite in that way, a part so famous for their manners seems the obvious choice.
What a lovely thing to say. *smile* Of course, there are accents…and then there are accents. The pleasure you might find in hearing a southern one may compare to the pleasure i find in hearing a Scots accent, for example.
elise