...it’s mandatory that we give it at least one ear.
I must “pre-apologize” for what follows. All I can say is that it tickled me so powerfully that I felt compelled to share it with you. It is so expressive, so eloquent, and so in harmony with the Zeitgeist of our time, that it must belong to the world. Like cold fusion, it has the power to reshape all of Mankind: our ways, our institutions, our hopes and fears, and most especially our vernacular.
(Hey, the vernacular is important. A lot more people can understand what’s going on during the Mass now that it’s celebrated in the vernacular tongue of wherever it’s performed. And that’s coming from one who took six years of Latin in preparation for the priesthood. Deal with it.)
As one who has sternly advocated a strict prescriptive approach to English grammar, it sometimes pains me to admit that there are...sins...that I, too, commit regularly. Among those sins is one for which I invented the most common term: verbing. It’s the transformation of a noun into a verb in serene defiance of its total lack of a verb form. This offense against the lexicon has become so well integrated into the discourse that appears on the World Wide Web that we scarcely take note of it today.
The inverse offense might be called “nouning.” Surely the practice to which this label applies could not be more obvious. But nouning is less common than verbing, with one conspicuous exception which seems to have become the standard method for expressing indifference to some matter.
That exception is at the heart of today’s video-musical interlude, which shall now begin:
Note how many ways this trend in popular expression can be reformulated. The performer / composer, Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq., appears to have made a deep study of the phenomenon. I can only salute his dedication to what many would call a thankless task.
Gentle Reader, beware of the reduction of phrases once used to connote extreme intensity of emotion into typeset formulae that can’t even shock a listener any more. I’m serious about that: I recently heard a seventy-eight year old grandmother produce utterances that once would have silenced a longshoreman. Our language is being drained of its red blood. The process doesn’t start with a humorous ditty such as the one above; it ends with it.
What’s that you say? As the dictator verborum to the World Wide Web, the responsibility to police such offenses is properly mine? Where did you get such a notion? Get the fuck out of here!
2 comments:
my new anthem
I think the exsanguination of our language is a direct byproduct of the coarsening of our culture. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Regardless of which it may be - we are the worse for it. One of English’s strong suits is it’s nearly infinite subtlety of expression, allowing remarkable precision in sharing of ideas and feelings. The demonstration of ‘nouning’ you presented shows this being drained from the vernacular - or at least the common vernacular... and for this, I mourn. But that us not the worst of it - the constant appropriation and subsequent redefinition of words makes it harder and harder to even come to agreement about common concepts, let alone values.
And while I find the little ditty/musical interlude humorous, I’m still nagged by the following thought:
It’s almost like someone was intentionally trying to kill the culture by removing our ability to communicate... :-/
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