Romnesia! English is a wonderful language, and it's so cool that Twitter helps it out with hashtags. My text for today's Top Comments (again, we distract -- I was going to come to terms with the Election of 1876 for my Monday class but that can wait, and I HOPE it's not appropriate for TC the day after the election) comes from a wonderful series on the New York Times Opinion page, "Draft,"
a series about the art and craft of writing
because Friday's entry,
Mutant Verbs, by Helen Sword, jumped out at my cranky grammarian self and said
"Diary me."
So the Verbification edition it is. Below the fold for more.
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Verbification. A noun, describing the process wherein a noun or an adjective is rendered into a verb. Prettify a room, brown something in your saute pan "pimp my ride." You get the idea. Most neologisms of this type don't have a long shelf life. Surnames, especially.
Surname-inspired verbs seldom outlive their namesakes. (Two notable exceptions are bowdlerize and mesmerize, coined in dubious honor of the Shakespearean expurgator Thomas Bowdler and the physician Friedrich Anton Franz Mesmer, respectively.) Most of the verbified proper names in Paul Simon’s 1965 song “A Simple Desultory Philippic” — John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d, Lou Adlered, Barry Sadlered — are already obsolescent.
Since you mention it, here's the song. Paul Simon does his best Bob Dylan imitation (this is 1965, and I defy anyone my age to say he or she DIDNT own "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme,") and this version gives you pictures of all the people mentioned in the song (even Ayn Rand!). Cultural literacy for the mid-1960s (actually, cultural SNOBBERY), and the song even TELLS you so. I had forgotten what a tour de force this was. Seriously, listen to this - some sample lyrics:
He's not the same as you and me.
He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that
When you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture,
But it's alright, ma,
Everybody must get stoned.
If you're close to my age, you'll understand it all. If not, it's like I said about James McCourt, "off to the google with you for the stuff you don't recognize."
Some technical naming stuff (for those of you who are interested, verbification is "known as anthimeria, deliberately employing words from one grammatical category as though they belonged to another.") And then, the history, with some absolute nuggets.
The craze for -ization — a word first employed by Charles Dickens in “Our Mutual Friend” — has been around for a very long time. The patron saint of rampant suffixization is Thomas Nashe, author of the 1593 pamphlet “Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem.” His ebullient creations included myrmidonize, unmortalize, anthropophagize, retranquillize, cabbalize, palpabrize, superficialize and citizenize — not to mention collachrymate, assertionate and intercessionate. Taken to task for his over-the-top vocabulary, Nashe later defended himself in the pamphlet’s second edition, comparing his “swelling and boystrous” coinages to the “great peeces of gold, such as double Pistols and Portugues,” amassed by wealthy men in exchange for lesser currency.
Knowing how to use language, in this case English, in Elizabethan England, is seen as a form of wealth! What a concept! Very useful in the Obama-Romney comparison: all the money in the world and one of them can't use words to make sense a lot of the time.
Yes, it can be annoying (I'm quoting out of sequence here, but reader-response theory says I can rearrange what I read in my attempt to create meaning out of it)
Do mutant verbs enrich the English language or pollute it? When Shakespeare uses an anthimerial verb such as peace, uncle or ghost, we praise his genius. But when our boss urges us to solutionize a problem, we run screaming from the room. Whatever happened to solve?
As with everything, doing it well takes skill.
Sword concludes:
Inevitably, some neologistic verbs will find their way into our dictionaries and our daily lives. That’s how language works. We can shoo them away, or we can celebrationalize their spooky radioactive glow. Either way, the mutants just keep coming.
Hallowe'en is apparently forever linked to the development of the English language, and we're richer for it.
And now for the real reasons you come here:
TOP COMMENTS
November 3, 2012
Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU
when you find that proficient comment.
From BobBlueMass
NMDad's comment on fou's ecstatic reaction to the diary natedogg265 posted about the Marist poll showing President Obama up 6 in Ohio.
From BlueJessamine
In today's New Day diary, expertly crafted by navajo, renzo capetti replied to the diary in "pure poetry."
In this thread from Kos's hate mail-a-palooza diary, annieli kicks it off, wishingwell ups the ante, and our comment provider furnishes the visual evidence a couple of times (scroll down).
From mdmslle
Ann's tears like Rosalyn and Amy Carter's? CJB says not quite.
From Steveningen
Just before DKos went down last night, AnnetteK posted this great comment in Darttagnan's excellent Fox News diary.
I think 4CasandChlo's just said it all about the state of the wingnut mind. Found in this great diary by pollwatcher.
From Thestral
Floridagal's diary on a failed charter school in Florida (what a surprise!) produced Charter School Principal as Funeral Director from AdamSelene and some wonderful snark from Commonmass.
From your humble diarist
The weekly diary Kos writes about his hatemail is always a treasure trove for material and our TCer gizmo59 came up with a gem today.
I KNEW there had to be something in Steveningen's diary,This is CHER, b*tches! Do what she says! and MBNYC provided it in spades!
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TOP MOJO
November 2, 2012
(excluding Tip Jars and first comments)
Thanks, mik!
1) Mitt Romney. by TheGreatLeapForward — 232
2) All the areas affected by gchaucer2 — 194
3) Chuck Todd falls into the same category. by Scarce — 187
4) This isn't about Geraldo turning Democratic by Nowhere Man — 180
5) Let me be first to say... by kismet — 146
6) Occupy Sandy in Action (video) by noweasels — 141
7) I guess she didn't see the billboard saying... by JohnB47 — 140
8) chuck todd on tweety last night: it was SO hard by memofromturner — 132
9) Open letter to Dennis Trainor Jr by Quicklund — 113
10) Too late by chicago minx — 113
11) Lead? by Rights of Bill — 108
12) Damned hippies by BOHICA — 101
13) The timing is more than suspect? by Steveningen — 101
14) That's the short of it by Troutfishing — 95
15) ooooo... weeeeeeee by ardyess — 87
16) on a friends's first day of law school by marykk — 86
17) What is suspect... by richardak — 82
18) "Looks to be tied! A dead heat!" (Meme for 2012)nt by mdmslle — 80
19) I missed this. by IndieGuy — 79
20) He claims to know how to create jobs. by JBL55 — 78
21) This presidential election will also go down in... by markthshark — 77
22) even if romney was confronted with by sodalis — 77
23) The "new" RePubs have always had this policy by fourthcornerman — 77
24) Something cool in Sarasota: by Wendy in FL — 75
25) I wish the diarist would connect Petraeus... by Bob Johnson — 75
26) LOL, I saw that. by StellaRay — 75
27) Very True ^^^^^^^ by 4CasandChlo — 74
28) got that from a Mormon boss every day in 86 by BlackSheep1 — 74
29) No Difference Between Bush & Gore by TarantinoDork — 73
30) You refer to Petreus, but it's not clear what he by lineatus — 72
31) Darn near all the people who are... by BarackStarObama — 72
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TOP PHOTOS
November 2, 2012
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt™ below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!
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