Over the last day, the American Dialect Society's ads-l has had a couple of posts highlighting this euphemistic use, of, of all things, verbing the noun for, well, something that there are only roughly 250,000 euphemisms for. Wow. Let's not even think about vocabulary hoaxes here.Happily, Ben Zimmer did today's "On Language" in the NYT and he mounts a vigorous defense of to podium and to medal, in Olympic usage, introducing non-linguists nicely to the key bits of how derivation works. Thanks, Ben, for speaking up for verbing.
Image from here.
2 comments:
Podium! I'll take gold even if the first place was a doper...
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