Open Writing

A librarian told me about a friend's new, unseasoned boss who's a real task-master, in that he begins all instructions with "I task you with …." Such boorishness smacks of not being round the track often, and not being a good reader. "Doesn't he know that 'task' is a verb?" the librarian rhetorically mused.

Lately verbs are causing increasing amounts of confusion. Why, even kindly, and lively, retired librarian Barbara Gorman, an emeritus member of the Fairbanks Library Foundation, was recently compelled by a blown verb in the News Miner to write a thoughtful letter to the editor that closed, "I realize in the light of all the major issues that keep cropping up in our world today (and she goes on to list some whoppers), to complain about grammatical lapses is rather trivial, but we should all set some standards."

Speaking of standards, or lack thereof, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Delaware University English professor Ben Yagoda titled "The Elements of Clunk." In it he compares his current students' worst writing errors with those from four years ago, and he provides a sample that contains at least eleven errors: "For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we thought we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie 'Iron Man 2'."

Yagoda dissects the errors: a passel of erroneous commas, "myself" should be "I," "gray" is not spelled "grey," "amongst" should be "among," etc. Today's students seem prone to errors in their composition that "make it longer and more prosaic" in an attempt to appear more sophisticated. Sadly, too many students fail but can't tell the difference. "Standard written English is a whole other language from its spoken (and texted) counterpart," Yagoda points out, "with conventions not just of punctuation but also of many shortcuts to meaning – streamlined words and phrases, ellipses (omitted words), idioms, figures of speech – that have developed over many years. You learn them by reading. And when you haven't read much, when you set pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way though a dark house."

Students aren't the only culprits vandalizing our tongue. Politics, finance, sports, and especially technology are all chipping in by supporting the current fad of "verbing," or using nouns as verbs. Technology is particularly culpable, according to a MoreIntelligentLife.com article by Anthony Gardner titled "You've Been Verbed," because "it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist: we 'text' from our mobile, 'bookmark' websites, 'inbox' our e-mail contacts … 'Blog' had scarcely arrived before it was adopted as a verb."

Gardner says the proper linguistic term for verbing is "denominalisation," and he quotes Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct": "easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English." But today, according to Collins Dictionary of the English Language editor Robert Groves, "Potential changes in our language are picked up and repeated faster than they would have been in the past." In some ways English can be simpler than other Indo-European languages. For example inflections are seldom required to show differences in verb tenses so action words like "snowboard" and "party" can be both verb and noun in English, but not in German, French, Chinese, and many other languages.

English's flexibility may be a blessing or a curse, but if you want to write in a manner than doesn't mark you as a rube or buffoon, start reading for pleasure. You'll discover how true verbal masters skillfully use language to demonstrate their experienced, nuanced intelligence.