Verbonation
What am I doing?
I’m “blogging”, you might tell me. I might then reasonably ask you what the fuck that means. It means I’m writing a post in my weblog, a new mechanism for interpersonal communication. When I say new, I mean it’s maybe ten years old, tops. Before that there were no blogs, was no such thing as blogging, yet blogs are almost the hoary old man of internet communication.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about Facebook and Twitter. And that’s good, because what I want to talk about here assumes that you know what they are. If not, well, ask the kids, gramps.
What I want to talk about is verbs. I’m blogging - that’s the thing I’m doing. But that thing, that verb, didn’t exist when I was in high school. I couldn’t have done that thing back then, couldn’t have blogged the way I could have walked, spat, eaten, or slept.
And in the last few years I’ve become able to do a bunch more things, too. I can Facebook, for instance.
The first time I heard “Facebook” used as a verb, I was standing in line at the Liquor Mart. The girl standing in front of me had realized that the girl standing in front of her was a long-lost friend and, long story short, she said that she would “Facebook [her friend]” when she got home.
At the time, this violent punch to the solar plexus of English caused me to bleed freely from my mouth and ears. But now I can hear about how people Facebooked - and can even Facebook myself - with only mild spasms.
As Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) once said: “verbing weirds language.” And I just couldn’t stand for it. But the reasoning that’s kept me warm and half-sane in the endless reaches of the night is that, eventually, the noun for any communication medium becomes the verb that describes its use.
I phone people all the time. Sometimes, I mail them (or, more accurately, they mail me bills and envelopes that read You have already been approved!) And, I imagine, one nineteenth-century gentleman might inform another that he telegraphed his bank as soon as he made the deposit. I mean, right? At some point, someone decided that “I sent a telegraph to” took way too long to say, and noun became verb. Right?
It’s the easiest thing in the world, the most natural, to assume that the foibles of your generation have never manifested themselves before. Oh, we’re the first generation to deal with accusations that violence in the popular media causes violence in the real world. It’s like slipping into a comfortable pair of slacks. But every generation does that, all the time, forever, and it’s stupid.
So it only seems reasonable to assume that verbing our methods of communication has always been the way of humankind. That it’s not just indicative of a seething void whose cold, cold black emptiness undulates nauseously just below the delicate surface of our collective consciousness.
We’re not all just hopeless idiots, senselessly mangling the English language through ignorance and laziness, right?
Come to think of it, verbing doesn’t just affect the communications media. I Google things all the time. Hell, I even Eye-Em-Dee-Bee actors and directors, and that’s way harder to say.
Please tell me we’ve always done this. Could be that it’s more apparent in the modern day because so many of the tools and services we use are proper nouns. Google became the industry-leading search engine, so its name is synonymous with searching for things on the internet. Same deal with YouTube and showing all your friends that goddamn video with Andy Samberg and T-Pain on the boat. They’re the 21st-century version of how you say Kleenex when you mean “facial tissue” and rum ‘n’ Coke when you mean “rum and any syrupy, caramel-coloured, carbonated beverage”.
Twitter, as ambivalent as I am about belonging to another “friendship network” (I really think it’s of more value for connecting celebrities - at all levels of popularity - with their fans), is actually refreshing when it comes to verbosinization: making a post on the Twitter service is called “tweeting”, which, believe it or not, was already a verb - albeit one traditionally reserved for birds.
When you’re a hardcore English geek, it’s hard to accept that the language you adore can change, and that the forerunners of that evolution are the same goddamned wild animals that say things like “c u 2nite @ 8!!!” via the Short Message Service. But just as Trekkies must ultimately bow before their new master - that guy who made Lost - I must blog, Google, text, Facebook, IM (pronounced “im”), and YouTube… and love it.
And seriously, guys, that new Star Trek looks awesome.