Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Let’s turn these nouns into verbs. Let’s not.

We are going to modernize the application to optimize it and maximize our efforts. — Wrote someone who shouldn’t have been writing

In other words, we want maximum free time. Let’s make the application modern and optimal.

Turning a noun into a verb (I love this next part with all the fancy words) is called verbing or verbification. Some say that we nominalized the noun into a verb. Some say this is an anthimeria or functional shift (I really like that word, anthimeria). Of course these examples are affixations where we add the suffix -ize to the noun to make a verb.

Turning a noun into a verb is also called being lazy. There is a verb out there waiting to be used. Let’s find it and use it. We could also simply say what we want to say using the nouns as nouns. That’s what I did in the example above. Not enough long and fancy words? Oh well.

We can do better. Let’s do better.