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Jennifer Howard

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A Very Brief Rant About Verbing

February 15, 2013

Rage, rage against the verbing of the noun (and the adjective). I’m sorry to have to tell you that at a recent publishers’ confab I heard speakers talk about “solutioning” and “obsoleting.”

“Innovate” as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it’s okay, and I’m not going to argue with the dictionary.) But don’t let’s go verbing more perfectly good parts of speech that are happy the way they are. Coming up with fresh approaches to, say, publishing or higher education or whatever doesn’t require abusing the language.

If you’ve come across other examples of egregious verbing, please share them. I want to know how fast this plague is spreading.

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Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

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