Thursday, November 16, 2006

Verbing ...


Oh, I will never forget the day when Calvin said to Hobbes that 'verbing weirds language.' The whole extended Verb family was so proud of our role in weirding language, Ma Verb and Pa Verb, all the helping Verbs and the modals, too, Verbs strong, weak and mixed, the world around. How things have changed since that memorable day! 'Verbing' gets 106,000 raw g-hits; and a Language Log poster (Benjamin Zimmer) long ago casually wrote 'Yes, yes, we all know Calvin's dictum that "verbing weirds language."'

But only now -- from Evil Mad Scientist, and with many thanks to an old friend who passed on the link -- do we find an image to go with that fame. (He passed it on as an example of the 'I am in ur X, killin' ur Yz' meme that comes from gamer language.) But don't you love the pic? The venerable OED and that cat with the slightly wild look about it.

Verbally,
Mr. V

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