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Stephen Fry is certainly right in attacking the pedantry of the grammar police and usage purists but he’s touching on a different phenomenon when talking about the verbing of nouns. For the most part this verbing takes place in the corporate world and is done for the purpose of creating jargon. Corporate jargon is a major source of new coinages and seems to be in an arms race to stay ahead of common usage. As soon as jargon becomes common (e.g. leverage as a verb) new coinages are created (e.g. synergise).
The purpose of this jargon (and any jargon) is to position the speaker as the member of an “in-group” that is not accessible to the “out-group”. In this way corporations become out of touch with the lives of those outside the organization.
The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. New examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants.Read more at www.stephenfry.com
