MacMillan Dictionaries has created this fun quiz on my favourite subject, functional shifts, better known as "Is it OK to use a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun?" The answer is YES, by the way. You can read my thoughts about it here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2010/09/verbs-its-ok-to-do-this-really.html
For many other examples that I've written about, you can click on the "nouns as verbs" tag.
Here's the quiz:
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/nounings-and-verbings-quiz
I
don't think the point of the quiz is to see how many you get "right",
actually. I think it is to show how very embedded these conversions have
become in English, so we no longer have any notion that "Well, that's
really a NOUN; it shouldn't be used as a verb". Or vice versa.
Oh, and by the way, if you're tempted to quote Calvin and Hobbes "Verbing weirds language" as someone always does when this topic comes up, please don't. Verbing enriches the language, and it's perfectly normal. Not weird at all.
Hi Katherine,
ReplyDeleteThe most funny thing about the notion "Verbing weirds language" is that a noun "verb" and an adjective "weird" are converted here to verbs so naturally.