Friday, January 12, 2007

More evil verbs in the news

PBS's News Hour, in a truly depressing segment on the descent into utter hell in Iraq, had a guest use 'to surge' as a transitive verb, something like a need 'to surge civilians'. Surge got a lot of discussion as a possible Word of the Year at the ADS this year, and one very smart person (can't recall who) suggested that it was likely to become the word of 2007 rather than 2006.

3 comments:

Ben Zimmer said...

I wrote about "surging troops" here, but I hadn't heard of "surging civilians" before.

Mr. Verb said...

I only sort of half heard it, so don't quote me on the precise phrase, but it was an expansion from troops -- the context of course was the need to increase political activity, etc., and not just military.

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