Verbing Makes Me [sic]

I was listening to a radio commercial this morning for an HVAC company that was touting how its product can heat and cool rooms individually. Except they didn’t use the words “heat” and “cool.” Instead, they claimed that their system will “comfort” each room in your house independently. “Comfort”? Since when is the word “comfort” a verb?? Well, okay, it CAN be a verb, as in “When my baby cries, I comfort her.” But this ad was taking the NOUN “comfort,” which means “a state of ease or satisfaction of bodily wants,” and making it into a verb. It was verbing it, if you will.

The concept of verbing is something of a distressing trend to me. And it is becoming amazingly common. Thanks to Facebook, the noun “friend” is now a verb, as in “An old classmate friended me the other day.” How about “dialogue”? That’s a lovely little noun that has been verbed in recent years. We don’t converse any more, we “dialogue.” I read about a flight attendant who apologized to her passengers that there would be a short delay in “beveraging” them. Really? “Beverage” is now a verb? Will we all be drinking from a trough full of Coke, like when you water a horse? And if you want to give someone a present, you now “gift” it to them. Why can’t you just give it to them? It’s not any longer or harder to pronounce or spell. Its only improvement over the original is that it makes the heads of grammar Nazis like me explode.

Sometimes it works in reverse, making a noun out of a verb. (Thank goodness, I’ve yet to hear the word “nouning” to describe the phenomenon.) The word “invite,” for example, which used to be a verb meaning “to request politely or formally,” is now a noun meaning “invitation.” Was there something wrong with the word “invitation”? Were four syllables just too overwhelming? Is that really such a problem that we needed to cut the length of the word in half?

I think what bothers me most about verbing is that there are so many delicious words already existing, and adding new ones merely serves to further limit the use of those words. When new words are used to introduce shades of meaning and describe things that did not previously exist, then I’m all in favor of adding them to the lexicon. But making the word “gift” into a verb doesn’t add anything. There is absolutely zero difference between “give” and “gift” other than the fact that no-one would ever have used the word “gift” as a verb 20 years ago. Ditto for the words “invitation” and “invite.” The language did not become richer or more descriptive by adding that new use.

So let’s all work on combatting this trend by bringing back the wonderful, descriptive verbs of years gone by. From Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day archives, how about these beauties: gambol, undulate, gainsay, bloviate, belaud, pervade, kowtow, inspissate, oppugn. (Yeah, I said “oppugn.” Go look it up.) Or a few glorious rarely-used nouns, like incunabulum (INCUNABULUM!!!!), scaramouch (Freddy Mercury knew what it meant, do you?), marplot, tucket, luciferin. And I must throw in a few other parts of speech just to be fair: lugubrious, gibbous, anthophilous, florid. THOSE are words, my friends. They look beautiful in writing, they feel lovely rolling off your tongue, they make you feel smart just using them correctly in a sentence.

But at the absolute least, let’s all get back to our grammatical roots by taking a little trip back to Saturday morning circa 1978.

Those are verbs that won’t make anyone [sic]!

Three Is a Magic Number

When I got home from picking Herb up at the airport yesterday afternoon, one of the first things we did when we got out of the car was have a family group hug with Ryan in the middle. I had one arm wrapped around Herb and one around Ryan, Herb had one around Ryan and one around me, and Ryan was flailing at both of us and getting a big kiss on each chubby cheek from us both. It was the best feeling ever!

And then late this morning, Herb took a short nap and just before his alarm was set to go off, I snuck in the room with Ryan and let him pat Daddy’s face to wake him up. Naturally the three of us ended up in a big clinch in the middle of the bed, wrestling and giggling. Best group hug ever!

There’s just something amazing about the family all snuggling together. Physical contact is truly an emotionally bonding experience, and when all three of us are in such close contact, I just feel like my heart will burst with happiness over how precious a family I’ve been blessed with.

It reminds me of the line from Schoolhouse Rock: “Man and a woman had a little baby – there were three in the family, that’s a magic number.” One point is just a point, two points are a line, but three points – that gets you a whole plane! Three points make a stable tricycle, a solid stool, a useful tabletop. Three is a special number throughout the Bible: the three gifts of the Magi, the three sons of Noah, Daniel’s thrice-daily prayers, the three parts of the Godhead, the three days between Christ’s death and resurrection. There’s a special significance to three, a sense of completion and perfection.

Our true family already includes more than three, and our family may not even be complete yet. But the three that are in our household right now? Are absolute perfection.