I heart baseball

So glad that it's baseball season finally.  Not just for the game - also for the wonderful announcers.
Tonight's gem:

He's gonna nonchalant a ground ball.

 Ahhhh.  I love baseball.

"Irritating nouns-as-verbs"

Henry Hitchings has a piece in the NYT this morning called "Those Irritating Nouns-as-Verbs", here. It's about stuff of the type "do you have a solve for this problem" and "let's all focus on the build" (his examples). I was all set for a rant about peevology and how nouning is just as fun as verbing, but it's much less peevologically driven than I first assumed.

Still, the real value in the piece, I'd say, is Grant Snider's graphic, starting with the title.

Verbing: world domination edition

Whoa, this is a little scary:

Image from here.

Verbing in the news: good, bad and ugly

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.

Outrageous verbing? to saddleback

Maybe the worst moment of the Obama administration to date has been his invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation* at the inauguration. In case anybody reads this years from now when it's been forgotten: Warren has railed against equal rights for gays and lesbians and said deeply offensive things about them.

Sex advice columnist Dan Savage coined the noun santorum (if you don't know, you probably don't want to ask) after anti-gay ex-Senator Rick Santorum. Recently, he decided that Warren warranted a verb, and chose the name of his mega-church, Saddleback (image from here). And he ran a piece on the topic and polled readers. The results are in:

Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage.

The most outrageous verbing in a while, surely, but nothing next to the meaning. Say, how are things going on getting sex education going again?

By the way, note a glitch: 'citation forms' of verbs in English are usually infinitives not -ing forms and the definition is of a noun, right?

*I'm not the praying type, but it was pretty generic, and the president's inclusion of 'non-believers' in his speech was more memorable.