Note: Verbing

So today in my written communication class, we were talking about the invention of ideas. In groups, we were supposed to take a recent fad and do a spiderweb chart/graph to analyze it. My group had a fairly large list of idea we could expand. One of items: Verbing.

"What's that?," you ask. Well, let me tell you. Verbing (v): the action of adding -ing to a noun to create a verb. ex: Googling, YouTubing, Facebooking, etc.

We have been doing this for as long as we can remember. I heard the other day that the word "friend" is not longer just a noun. It has been added as a verb. I wanted to see if this was true so I opened my dictionary on my computer and sure enough, there it is. friend (v): add (someone) to a list of contacts associated with a social networking website: I am friended by 29 people who I have not friended back.

My group was trying to figure out why this is true. We first thought that is a marketing tool for companies, like Google. They were able to make 'to Google' an actual phrase. Then we thought it could possibly be used for news reports. Since a news report needs to be short and sweet, it might just be easier to shorten it up. But then we said it could be that we are possibly just lazy. Instead of saying, "I am going to go search for that on the internet using Google," we say instead, "Google it."

Is it laziness or is it ingenuity? It's just food for thought. Comment and let me know!

Peace!

-Nicole