e-Verb-erating

We describe our day-to-day lives in terms that would have been rather foreign to our forebears of 10 or 20 years ago. We google potential employers, and facebook potential dates. Some people eBay old textbooks, and we all spend an inordinate amount of time e-mailing and IM-ing friends, professors, and parents. The rate at which technologically-charged action verbs enter our vocabulary these days is staggering.

What’s perhaps most peculiar about these verbs, however, is that the majority of them seem to come from nouns. Sometimes it’s the name of a company—surely Google’s marketers are happy that their firm’s name has seeped into the common lexicon (though the company’s lawyers have been known to send out nasty letters to those who use the word publicly without an obvious reference to the search software giant, in order to protect their trademark). Occasionally it happens because the noun already had a verb embedded in it: we’ve mailed letters for long enough that e-mail was just asking for it, and what else would you call the act of instant messaging someone other than, well, instant messaging them?

But it doesn’t have to be this way. No one internets the Internet or webs the web—we’ve stuck with obscure transportation or shopping metaphors: surf (perhaps stolen from television), browse, or navigate. We don’t go iPodding-rather, we listen to an iPod—and whatever it would mean to mp3 something, it’s not obvious I’ve ever done it.

Still, history suggests a great diversity of ways in which we’ve attached verbs to technology. When the car was invented, ‘driving’ was borrowed from the owners of carriages, and to travel on an airplane was naturally termed ‘flying.’ ‘Phone’ and ‘telephone,’ long-standing fixtures of language both, appear to be falling out of favor as verbs despite Who Wants to be a Millionaire‘s allowance that participants can ‘phone a friend.’ Instead, we call them up (far preferable to ‘celling’ them, as this would set up some unfortunate verbal puns). Of course, in some circles, calling is passé for different reasons entirely and has been replaced by ‘texting,’ which is another noun-turned-verb.

The verbing (as it has been ironically termed) of technology nouns is nothing new. Consider the microwave, which started as a ‘microwave oven’ in 1972, lost the ‘oven’ in ’74, and by ’76 had become something you do to your food. We might even be thankful: ‘to microwave’ seems to have successfully beaten out the far less appealing ‘microcook,’ which saw a surge of popularity in the late 1970s but has, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), since only resurfaced in magazines such as Midwest Living. And this is all terribly recent when compared with ‘plow,’ which after 300 years in noun-land seems to have made the jump some time the mid 15th century.

The interesting question to consider, and where the moral of this story lies (for anyone worth his salt at columning must always be working towards a moral) is why this is so. Why is it that so many of the verbs we use which come from nouns have to do with technology? There are exceptions of course—‘clowning’ came from ‘clown’, ‘toying’ perhaps from ‘toy’—but why have we been particularly uncreative when it comes to describing what we do with new inventions?

One possibility is that technology, particularly these days, is moving so quickly we just do what’s easiest. Before we had any inkling what was happening we were ‘looking up things on Google’ so often it got to be exhausting to say so, and ‘to google’ was such an appealing alternative we took it up without a moment’s thought. Verbs stolen from nouns also carry a wealth of embedded information—facebooking someone in your section is much more interesting than merely ‘looking her up,’ as it suggests you’ll know who she’s friends with and whether she went to a “small, expensive and snobbish private school” or “a public school that might as well have been a private school,” and so on.

Another account seems more plausible, however. We ought simply to consider the most important feature of technology: that it’s functional. Unlike, say, a giraffe, what’s interesting about the facebook isn’t what it looks like or eats; it’s what you can do with it. Some naming schemes for technologies exhibit this in very pure form: they’ve come from verbs, as with the venerable toaster. The rest of the time, though, smart people invent things and give them names. For a while we’re content to talk about them as objects, but sooner or later we realize that their use is inextricably intertwined with their description, and so when we want to talk about using them we do the most obvious thing: we turn their name into a verb.

Whether some of these verbs will stand the test of time remains to be seen. Plow seems to have done fine, but Google the company may not be around forever (heresy, I know, but forever is a long time) and it seems unlikely, though possible, that the verb will outlast the company. The OED takes a suitably reserved stance on the matter. It has an entry for the verb ‘to google,’ all right. The meaning, in fact, dates back to 1907, when it was first used in Badminton Magazine. It comes from the game of cricket, where it means (to the best of my ability to understand the British) something like ‘to hit a curve ball.’ Care to find out more? Google it…



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.