Travel broadens the mind, it’s said. I’m not sure where that leaves commuting, and its potential to stimulate good ideas. But it does allow the linguist space to contemplate why words do different things, and try out a few alternatives, without too much distraction.
I was thinking about nouns turning into verbs, as they often do in English. Why would nouns that seem related, or at least similar in content, work so differently when they become verbs? Bag and sack are my examples - to bag someone for your team is very different from sacking someone, semantically.
I started to think about other related options. You can dog someone’s footsteps; you can also hound them - those would seem to have a similar impact. Not all of them work: we can cap someone (in sport) but we don’t seem to hat them, for some reason.
Some nouns seem to be missing a trick, not going for verb conversion (to continue the sport metaphors). You would think that someone would see the potential of baconing, as an alternative to chickening, or worse, goosing. But with news of pig infections in recent days, we are perhaps rightly cautious, for now.
Perhaps it’s down to me choosing some very everyday nouns for my examples, which could allow for more imaginative metaphors when they become verbs, because they’re so widely understood. You can understand that ones related to animals or food would more easily be taken into new contexts, for example.
If we look at who’s doing all this verb conversion, a big contribution must be made by business, constantly chasing the next fresh image as well as the bottom line. Some must come out spontaneously, with someone not quite selecting the right word, but realising that the new coining has impact, and using it again.
So, the next time your bus is taking ages to move along its route, or whatever other commuting option you have, test out a few nouns for me, and let me know if you’ve got any more examples where seemingly related nouns behave completely differently as verbs. And create some new ones, if you fancy. Where the economy may be shrinking, language is thankfully almost always expanding.
December 9th, 2008
The season of hibernation continues. Do habits set in more quickly when it’s dark all the time? At any rate, we’re back to a reading aloud at the end of the day habit, and the book we’re on, “Full Tilt”, seems worth a mention, particularly when it contains descriptions of blue skies and heat.
We’re both keen on travel books, in this case the kind where someone else does the travelling and writes about it in a witty way. We have a few stacked up to read, and finally started this one, written by an Irish woman, Dervla Murphy, who decides to cycle to India. As you do. Or in fact, as she planned to do from the age of 10. But, unlike many of us and our early-stated ambitions, she actually sets off to do it, once in her 30s, and with a suitably heroic bike which becomes a second leading lady in the story.
She writes in the 1960s, when the Soviets are being seen to be gathering in around Afghanistan, one of her countries on route, but have not yet got going fully. The Shah is still in place in Iran (or rather, Persia, as she calls it), and hitchhiking is still an option - all to the good for Dervla, if her bike breaks down or the road gets impassable.
Rather nicely, she includes an equipment list in the back of the book, so you can work out how many tubes of sun lotion to take on your next intercontinental trek. She also packs a pistol, literally, and writes about the uses of it in amazingly understated ways (let’s just say, there are still wolves in the woods of central Europe at the time she is passing through).
In some ways, we are happily ploughing through the next set of adventures; at points, we look at each other and say ‘Nutter!’ at the general endeavour. People are often saying how it’s difficult to do travels that others haven’t done - but you would have to ask yourself how many lone women would set out to do that kind of journey now, only a few decades later, even if she’s had the sense to send spare tyres and inner tubes ahead to a certain set of international organisation’s offices.
We have just reached the point where she is entering Afghanistan, and it will be interesting to see how the descriptions compare with the images we have from news stories of recent years. And in our current midwinter torpor, reading about someone casually knocking off 80 mile cycle rides, day after day, brings only admiration.
Meanwhile, Dan looked up Dervla’s name online, and found that she is still trying to do epic cycle rides now, in her 70s, though somewhat hampered by hips and knees not behaving themselves. Once an adventurer, always an adventurer? I suspect we will be looking out for sequels.
December 9th, 2008