When I leave the house, the first thing I see is a billboard. For the last few days it’s carried a picture of an wide-eyed, open-mouthed young woman wearing headphones. The slogan above her reads WEEKEND LIKE THERE’S NO-ONE WATCHING.
I have no idea what’s being advertised. It was only yesterday that I worked out what that sentence meant.
The source of my confusion was the use of ‘weekend’ as a verb. If this has been part of common parlance for long enough to serve as a marketing tool, I haven’t noticed it.
A few miles to the south, at the end of a narrow lane climbing back from the cliff-top road that connects Sunderland with Seaham Harbour, stands the 7th century St Mary’s church. Bolted to the wall beside the gate is a small circular plaque. It explains that the church is ‘structured mainly from sandstone’.
This time, of course, the meaning was clear.
So why did the billboard bring from me nothing more than a sad shake of the head, whilst the plaque made me want to march straight into the offices of Durham County Council and demand to know the name of the cretin who composed the text?
Verbs such as ‘to weekend’ arise out of laziness. They don’t annoy me too much because my mind can easily turn them back into nouns. It inserts [spend the] without me having to make a conscious effort to do so. When someone says ‘I like to party’ I conclude that they like going to parties. The noun in question hasn’t really disappeared.
‘Structured’ belongs to an altogether more vicious species.
Consider the most likely alternative. ‘Built mainly from sandstone’. I’m immediately reminded of the effort it must have taken to erect this church. Months, possibly years of back-breaking labour went into it. Each block had to be shaped, dressed and lifted into place.
‘Structured’ evokes none of this. It just tells me what the church is made of. I’m not encouraged to wonder how it came to be there.
Yet it’s harmless when measured against its evil cousin, the verb ‘to task’.
These days people will routinely speak or write of being ‘tasked’ to do something, almost always in the context of the workplace. ‘I was tasked with producing a report.’
A few years ago they might have said ‘I was asked to produce a report’.
What a huge difference in meaning!
If my employer asks me to do something it implies that I’m a valued member of the team. My contribution matters.
If I’m tasked with something, I do it because that’s my job. I’m a cog in a machine. And I can be replaced.
See what the bosses did there?
My personal bête noire is the verb ‘to source’. I can just about live with the blurb that says ‘sourced from local produce’, but real people shouldn’t be using language like this. They get stuff, or find it, or obtain it, and if they’re really pretentious they might even procure it. In none of those cases do they sound as if they’ve bought into the corporate newspeak that’s burdened us with ‘to foreground’, ‘to impact’ and ‘to dialogue’.
‘We’re efforting this.’
‘The smarter way to office.’
These abominations are already here.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131176&page=1
Turning nouns into verbs isn’t a new phenomenon. On the whole it’s enriched the language. Whether this latest crop will continue to do so is open to question.
Music: Todd Rundgren – ‘Buffalo Grass’, from the album One Long Year
Comments
Or, for that matter...
Politicians may "table" a piece of legislation. In many languages it’s relatively difficult to do this, but since English is relatively uninflected, one can change a noun to a verb, or vice versa, with a wave of the hand or the flap of a tongue. And in fact, many verbs can be easily made by adding the suffix, "...ing," as in "structuring," which is only a hop and a skip from "structured."
It’s so common in English that there’s even a technical term for it, "Conversion," which refers to changing a word from one class to another with no change in spelling at all.
Note too that there’s yet another word which refers to a rhetorical use of a word as if it belonged to another word class, "Anthimeria."
In any case, it’s been going on for a right long time.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
The problem ...
... with 'table' as a verb is that it means totally different things in US and UK English. Over here it means offering something for immediate discussion. I understand in the US it's the equivalent here of 'kicking into the long grass' ie putting off for an indefinite and probably very long, period. I seem to recall this difference causing serious misunderstanding in some inter government talks some years ago.
I've just been reading John Humphrys' book 'Lost for Words', a very relaxed look at English language usage. He despairs, however, of the poor teaching of grammar which leads to otherwise intelligent people being unable to express clearly their thoughts (like me?). He quotes a letter he received from a newly qualified school teacher who confessed having no idea of the difference between a noun and a verb! If graduates lack such basic knowledge and then go on t to teach others then I guess we're in for more 'structured weekends' :)
In any case, what's a Maccem doing criticising English? My time spent in Sunderland was fraught with difficulties understanding the natives. I once met a Durham miner when we were both competing in a long-distance motor cycle trial. Even when I asked him to speak slowly I got one word in three. He remains in my memory because he was called Gary Cooper - his parents must have been film fans! He probably had the same trouble decyphering my Derbyshire. (Just joking, Nicki - honest)
Robi