Let's office!

Learning to live with strange new verbs

CONFRONTED WITH THE business coinage "to office," Kathy Schenck, who blogs about language at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, did not hesitate: "This word should not be a verb," she declared.

Schenck conceded that it's mostly the novelty of such verbs that makes them sound ugly and jargony. If we all enthusiastically took up officing, whatever it is, we would eventually embrace the word, as we have the noun-derived verbs contact and phone and fax.

But Schenck's colleagues and readers, asked to suggest additional bad verbs, were not so tolerant. I wasn't surprised to see impact on their list - you can't be a nitpicker if you don't hate the verb impact. Or beverage, though that airline usage seems unlikely to spread.

But there were also objections to chair (a meeting), and author (an amendment), and partner (with Ginger) - verbs with whiskers on them, if not yet full beards.

This seems like lazy peevology. Surely, people who want to complain about nasty new verb uses should be looking for fresher examples? They're out there, if you keep your ears open and your eyes peeled.

Just last month, for instance, I was introduced to the verb blase (to act blase, cool, unimpressed) by a caller to NPR's "Talk of the Nation." The caller, unpersuaded by former US representative Vin Weber's answers to questions about veterans' healthcare, said, "You're just blase-ing it over." Weber understood instantly, and replied that he was not "blase-ing it over."

This usage isn't exactly ubiquitous yet - and on the Web, it's buried among hundreds of examples of blaseing as a typo for blazing - but it also turned up on the Washington Monthly's website: "If the too-cool-to-care political press . . . want to make an elaborate show of out-blase-ing one another, so be it."

Then there's the business verb lump-sum, meaning "take a payment all at once" and variations on that theme, which is seeping into general use as a verb meaning "lump together." Said a commenter on an EPA website: "You have lump-summed all air cleaners into one category."

And a member of the FLDS church, talking to a radio interviewer recently about the wholesale removal of the children from the sect's Texas compound, objected thus: "I haven't broken any laws and neither have my children but we've been lump-summed into this whole program."

Verb meanings can evolve in less obvious ways, too. Fox News commenter Liz Trotta, in trying to characterize Hillary Clinton's unfortunate assassination reference, made an even more unfortunate stumble, saying we might want to "knock off" both Osama and Obama.

That's an ordinary slang verb, of course, however ill-advised it was. But the next day, as she apologized for her "lame attempt at humor," Trotta snuck in a new meaning for a different verbal idiom. "I really just fell all over myself in making it appear that I wished Barack Obama harm . . . and I sincerely regret it," she said.

"I fell all over myself" doesn't generally mean "I stumbled" or "I put my foot in it," though. It means "I was eager or anxious," like a puppy scrambling over its littermates in search of dinner.

For instance, "The judges fell all over themselves praising [David] Archuleta's rendition of 'Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me"' (the Deseret News on last week's "American Idol"). Or "any maitre d' would be falling over himself to welcome Carrie, Samantha et al." (the London Evening Standard).

You can even "fall over backward" to accommodate someone, which seems to be an extreme form of bending over backward. But none of these falls involve putting a foot in your mouth, the sense Trotta surely intended.

Truss up is evolving, too, as I noticed in a quote from British fashion writer Hadley Freeman posted at Nancy Friedman's blog Fritinancy. "Homage," said Freeman, is "a conveniently trussed-up word for 'blatant copy.' "

To truss up is to tie up securely, like a turkey ready for roasting or a mob victim in a car trunk. It's not much of a stretch from that to describing a model in strappy, bondage-y fashions as trussed up - a sort of specialized variant of tarted up.

But Freeman seems to be saying that "homage" is a dressed-up term for copy or rip-off, an elegant word hiding a crude reality. In my book, this is a leap too far for trussed up, which still has a distinctly negative vibe. It's far more at home in uses like the Toronto Star's recent comment: "At least [Miley] Cyrus isn't trussed up in Bratz-like skankwear."

And there's more out there, much more. Impact may be a lost cause, but people are verbing gift and regift, suicide and incest, mouse and text, medal and podium. You may be tilting at windmills, but at least there are plenty of shiny new targets.