Curbing the verbing
THE OLYMPIC FLAME goes dark in Turin today, but at least one contest remains undecided: Will to podium succeed as a mainstream verb, following in the tracks of to medal, or will it find itself back on the sports-jargon shelf?
So far, to podium has generated less heat than to medal did in the games of the '90s perhaps because print reporters declined to copy the TV announcers' usage, except to quote an athlete or to deplore the ''new and annoying verb" (as the Miami Herald put it).
New it is, by linguistic standards; annoying to many, I don't doubt. And there's nothing wrong with resisting to podium on the grounds that it's unnecessary, ugly, or jargon-y. But some people conclude that because they despise the verbs like podium -- and impact and host and medal -- they disapprove of converting nouns into verbs, period.
On the Web, an editor boasts of her ''crusade to eliminate the turning-nouns-into-verbs phenomenon." A writing adviser declares, ''Of course you may not use [medal] as a verb. How horrible." In a London newspaper, a sportswriter complains of his colleagues' ''appalling habit, no doubt imported from America, of using a noun as a verb."
But do these dogmatic whiners really eschew verbs derived from nouns? Not a chance. You can bet that they mouth off, floor the accelerator, mentor pupils, and head committees on proper usage. They probably even phone home, fax contracts, and Google people. Not all such verbs are welcomed, but that doesn't make the process illegitimate.
The anti-verbing prejudice is not new, but Bill Watterson, the comic-strip genius of ''Calvin & Hobbes," deserves a bit of blame for encouraging it among people who should know better. In a much-quoted strip, he had Calvin say ''I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs....Verbing weirds language." Hobbes concurred, sarcastically: ''Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding."
Very funny, yes. But let's suspend disbelief for a moment, and suppose that Calvin asked his teacher, Miss Wormwood, to look up his new verbs in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Well, Calvin, she would have said, you think you turned an adjective into a verb, but actually weird was already a verb by the year 1300. Not your verb, it's true, but a regular English verb that meant ''foretell" or ''destine." According to a proverb, ''A man...will wed where he is weard" that is, fated, ordained.
The verb weird was derived from the much older noun wyrd, meaning ''destiny," ''fate," or sometimes, the Fates of Classical mythology, three goddesses who spun and snipped the threads of human life. ''Weird wends as she willeth," in the words of a 19th-century translation of the Old English ''Beowulf"; destiny does its thing.
Last came the adjective, the weird we know today. But wait, says the OED: When it first showed up in the phrase ''weird sisters," another name for those Fates weird wasn't yet a true adjective, but an attributive noun: A weird sister meant not an oddball sibling but a supernaturally gifted ''sister of the weird." (Frank Herbert, in the novel ''Dune," uses the similar ''weirding woman.")
In 1400, then, weird sister was a phrase like baseball player: You couldn't call a weird sister ''weirder," any more than you can call one baseball player ''baseballer" than another. It took a few hundred years, and the fame of Shakespeare's weird sisters in ''Macbeth," to pry loose the attributive weird, says the OED, and free it as a true adjective. Only in the early 19th century does weird become our familiar adjective meaning ''odd, mysterious, uncanny."
So Calvin, not for the first time, was overestimating his importance; his ancestors had long ago repurposed weird from noun to verb and adjective. (Even Calvin's other coinage, to verb, is already 70 years old.) Nothing could be less weird.
None of this is meant as a defense of podium, the verb, which has no advantages (in Olympic coverage, at least) over medal. In fact, podium may simply fail to thrive; it's been trying to break into print since at least 1988, when the Dallas Morning News reported that ''CBS, with 20 Emmys, also out-podiumed NBC."
But if to podium does catch on, try to look on the bright side. If the verb spreads, all the people who can't tell their podiums from their lecterns will finally have a clue.
E-mail freeman@globe.com. For four weeks' worth of The Word, visit boston.com/news/globe/ideas/freeman.
