Verbing in the news: "to fyi"

You've probably been following the story of Chris Comer, who was just fired as Director of Science Curriculum for the Texas Education Agency. Her crime was forwarding an email to a list about a lecture by a leading critic of Intelligent Design, which was counted as an endorsement of evolution. It's hard to even comment on the facts here.

At the Log, Bill Poser has just posted a note on the linguistics of this outrage, noting that interpreting the forwarding of an email as an endorsement of what's in the email is, well, wrong.

But there's a little tiny linguistic point in yesterday's NYT piece, here:

“I don’t see how I took a position by F.Y.I.-ing on a lecture like I F.Y.I. on global warming or stem-cell research,” Ms. Comer said.

To fyi, or to F.Y.I. as the Times copy editors prefer, just had to be out there … it sounds like perfect bureaucratic talk ... but I don't think I'd ever heard it and I'm pretty sure I'd never seen it in print.