{"id":1006,"date":"2014-09-18T19:16:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T18:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=1006"},"modified":"2014-09-18T19:16:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T18:16:09","slug":"night-of-the-living-dead-nouns-the-economist-1892014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=1006","title":{"rendered":"Night of the living dead nouns (The Economist 18\/9\/2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

VERBING nouns annoys a lot of people. Traditional complaints include those against “to impact”, “to chair” and “to author”. And newly verbed nouns are continually entering the language: from “to login”, to “to Facebook”, and “to friend”. But we forget how many old nouned verbs are now totally unobjectionable. Shakespeare was a master noun verber (coining “to dog” among others). Fifty years ago, “to host” was derided as glib journalese, though it is centuries old.\u00a0The Economist<\/em>\u2019s own style guide generally discourages vogue verbing.<\/p>\n

Is there anything worse than fashionable verbed nouns? As it happens, there is: nouned verbs and nouned adjectives. Or rather, over-reliance on abstract, fancy-looking but vague nouns formed from with suffixes like \u2013ation, -isation, -ment, -ship, -ance and so forth. They fill the worst kind of academic and bureaucratic prose, the kind a reader finishes and wonders why all those words just don\u2019t seem to mean anything.<\/p>\n

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\u201cNominalisation\u201d, the name for this phenomenon, is criticised by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psycholinguist, in his new book “The Sense of Style” (reviewed\u00a0Continue reading<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VERBING nouns annoys a lot of people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,13,65,56],"tags":[147,148,149],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t