The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #57509   Message #906170
Posted By: GUEST,Q
09-Mar-03 - 08:54 PM
Thread Name: BS: Nouns as Verbs: 'to summit Everest'
Subject: RE: BS: Nouns as Verbs: 'to summit Everest'
A number of those mentioned so far became noticable in the 1970s, although their history is probably older. Civil servants coined many of them- British, Australian, American, Canadian- their papers (Bunff) are too boring to read, but going through their memos would turn up older dates for many of these verbs from nouns.

Mentioned above- to stomach. This is an old one, first in print in 1523.
And Mary, if you were a gardener, you would know that to winter, or to summer, plants, roots, bulbs is old usage indeed. Do you have to winterize your car where you live? Just winter me where it is warm.

Medical people use a lot of these words- lobotomize for example, from the 1930s. Hysterectomize is horrible, I agree. (Er, the first is even worse).

While I was checking a word here, I ran across gnosticize (from Gnostic) in the Oxford. Dates back to the 1860s in print.

Verbicizing nouns has been going on in English since the language became identifiable as a language.