Wow, I didn't know that. I have used "access" incorrectly before. Our AHD says that verbifying "access" was judged unacceptable by 82% of the Usage Panel when it is not used technically. That is, it is acceptable to say: "This program makes it considerably easier to access files....", but you cannot say: "You can access your cash...."
quote:Originally posted by Kalleh: Wow, I didn't know that. I have used "access" incorrectly before. Our AHD says that verbifying "access" was judged unacceptable by _82%_ of the Usage Panel when it is _not_ used technically. That is, it is acceptable to say: _"This program makes it considerably easier to access files...."_, but you cannot say: _"You can access your cash...."_
Collins Dictionary agrees. Incidentally so do I, it was still an amusing cartoon though.
Interesting, Kalleh. The on-line AHD has no such note. It simply says "To obtain access to, especially by computer: used a browser to access a website; accessed her bank account online.
Just to sample older usage, I took a look at the 1913 version of Webster's. It gives no meaning of "access" as a verb, but it does contain a noun-meaning that was news to me:
quote:Access 3. Admission to sexual intercourse. During coverture, access of the husband shall be presumed, unless the contrary be shown. - Blackstone.
That use of "access" is new to me, too, wordnerd! Bob, that was really an excellent post. Now, I have researched "impact" a bit (I am open to others' views here!) and found that 84% of the AHD Usage Panel disapproves the use of "impact" to mean have an impact on, for example in the following sentence, "...social pathologies, common to the inner city, that impact heavily on such a community..." And, a full 95% disapproves of its being used as a transitive verb; eg, "Companies have used disposable techniques that have a potential for impacting our health." This Panel, in fact, uses words like "vile", "pretentious", "vulgarism" for this latter use of "impact." I must say, as a health professional, I have seen it used that way a lot. Comments????
A further observation on verbifying. While out at breakfast this morning I heard a father tell his six-year-old son, as they left, "You'd better zip up or velcro up; it's cold outside." Seems reasonable to me.
This is an interesting example of a verb ("to zip") which is now accepted without question. However, I am not sure of its history.
What I do know is that the "zip" fastener was originally a trade name, just as is, say, Hoover. And, like Hoover the trade name has become, in turn, a generic name and now a verb.
Everyone (except pedants like me) accepts the expression "to hoover the carpet" as an accurate alternative to the phrase, "vacuum-clean the carpet". Similarly we talk about "zipping ourselves up" when we actually mean fastening our coat or whatever using a slide fastener.
So common has "zip" become as a verb that even I use it without demur!
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
quote:Originally posted by shufitz: "You'd better zip up or velcroup; it's cold outside." Seems reasonable to me.
Sounds beastly to me.
So far the AHD and M-W list velcro only as a noun. The OED lists velcroed (Velcroed) as an adjective and gives quotes from 1972, 1981 and 1983. I suppose it's only a matter of time before it's listed as a verb. Oh, well...
While I do believe we've discussed this before, I assure you, Richard, that we in the states do not say, "Hoover the carpet", nor do we "Electrolux" nor "Kenmore" the carpet. We vacuum the carpet.
I do believe that there is a good story behind the invention of the zipper, but I cannot remember it. If my recollection serves me, velcro was developed when someone had burrs stuck to his clothing.
Access 3. Admission to sexual intercourse. During coverture, ************************************* I'm straying from the subject, but this brings up the word, consortium, which seems to be granted under coverture, and means something quite different if pronounced differently. Could one have a consortium of consorts granting consortium?
Interestingly, although "hoover" has become a generic term (much like "biro" and "thermos") - the vacuum cleaner was not invented by Hoover.
It was, as were so many other things, invented in England (by a man called Booth). What's more, his company, The British Vacuum Cleaning Company (BVC), was in existence until quite recently selling vacuum cleaners under the "Goblin" brand.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
In fact, my aunt had a Goblin vacuum cleaner and she called it the Gimpy (or was it Jimpy) which was, I believe, the name of a cartoon character (a goblin) in the Daily Mirror in the 1940s.
So we Jimpied the carpet.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
And the plot thickens.... According to a history of vacuum cleaners site that I just couldn't get to link here, Ives McGaffey patented a vacuum cleaner, called a "sweeping machine", in 1869. This was the first patent for a device that cleaned rugs. Furthermore, as Booth demonstrated his vacuum cleaner in a restaurant in 1901, 2 Americans were introducing variations on the same theme. I just wanted the Americans to get some credit here! After all, we've been getting a lot of grief because of our beers!
[This message was edited by Kalleh on Tue Jan 28th, 2003 at 20:04.]
Indeed this is so. But the device that the American was demonstrating blew the air into the carpet and relied on inertia and luck for the dust to get into the bag. Booth suggested that it would be better were the machine to suck and the American inventor apparently said that this would be impossible.
As the story goes, Booth went back to his Club, and laid a hankerchief on an upholstered chair and sucked through it. Although he was seized with a fit of coughing, when he examined the hankerchief he found that it was black with the dust it had trapped.
So he designed a machine that would suck (it was very large and had to do the job through the windows of the building) and so the company did the cleaning. It was, I agree, the Americans who came up with the idea of the portable, self-operated cleaner.
Hubert Booth died in 1955 and it was probably for him a pleasure mixed with sadness that his invention was in every home, but that it was an American who decided its final form.
I know this to be true, since last night I was sitting drinking pints of Harvey's Mild with Hubert Booth's great nephew, Allan. The strange thing about coincidences is that they happen so frequently!
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
Q: What do American vacuum cleaners and beers have in common?
A: They both suck.
Now, having said that, allow me to repeat that there are quite a number of American micro-breweries putting out a very fine product and more opening, it seems, every month. Budweiser represents the U.S. only in the same way that soccer hooligans represent the U.K. in that both seem to get far more coverage than they deserve.
The latest posting I have seen suggest that, according to Michael Jackson, there are now around 1500 "craft" beers in the USA - a very creditable achievement considering that about 15 years ago there were probably only half a dozen. In the UK the higher estimates are of around 5000 beers so the US is catching us up quite quickly.
The analogy between Budweiser and football hooligans is a good one but, I fear, mathematically suspect. Football in the UK is, believe it or believe it not, a minority interest. A substantial minority but a minority nevertherless. Football hooligans are a very small part of that minority.
Anheuser Busch, on the other hand, is by far the biggest brewer in the World (and I mean the whole world, not just the USA). They sell far more beer than any other brewer and we must therefore assume that someone is drinking it; there can't be that many slugs around that it can all go into slug traps!
Mind you, if every right-thinking American citizen refused to buy a drink for a friend unless it was a "craft" beer, that stranglehold would possibly be lifted!
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
Morgan, it is funny that you should ask that because I too wondered what Richard meant. However, I was afraid that I would sound so stupid so I didn't ask.
Richard, here is what that internet site had to say about the 2 vacuums that were invented by Americans; it does not sound similar to your explanation, though I am having a hard time posting the URL. I reached it by googling "invention of Hoover vacuum cleaners": "Corinne Dufour invented a device that sucked dust into a wet sponge. David E. Kenney’s huge machine was installed in the cellar and connected to a network of pipes leading to each room in the house. A corps of cleaners moved the machine from house to house."
Michael Jackson is the doyen of beer writers and his World Guide is the definitive work. He has a website and you will often see him quoted on beer-related pages. He is not related to the pop singer.
Hubert Booth invented the first air-moving cleaner that sucked, rather than blew. This was in 1903 and if you check a few more site (try entering "Hubert Booth" into google) you will find the details. If you enter "Inventors of Hoover vacuum cleaners", you will surely get Hoover's name - try leaving out the "Hoover".
Make sure you choose worldwide sites - if you restrict your search to US sites you may get a different answer (No US site I have found, for example, correctly credits the inventor of the incandescent electric light bulb - Joseph Swan - preferring instead to credit the man who made it work properly - Thomas Edison)
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
Yes, I saw it too. However, it, too, admits that Booth took out the first patent and carefully omits to say when the two US figures devised their machines, although it does trumpet the success of Hoover some years later.
I agree that while it doesn't "sound right," linguistically it seems to make sense. I would suggest the following equally logical terms:
Trialoging - Conversing with two other people at the same time. (A drawback is that this word begins with "trial" which could mislead a reader though not a listener.)
Quadraloging, Quintiloging etc. The sky's the limit.
Monologing - Speaking with someone but not paying a damn bit of attention to their contributions to the conversations. I meet these morons with amazing regularity. Don't they know who I am?!
quote: Monologing - Speaking with someone but not paying a damn bit of attention to their contributions to the conversations. I meet these morons with amazing regularity. Don't they know who I am?!
Huh? Did someone hear something?
Posts: 1412 | Location: Buffalo, NY, United States
Richard, my data on vacuum cleaners differ a bit from yours.
Booth was indeed the originator. His patent was in 1901 (not 1903), and he had the job of cleaning the carpet in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901. The church's cleaning staff was shocked at the great amount of dirt he extracted.
The chair-sucking incident apparantly involved, by Booth's account, a plush chair in a Victoria Street restaurant.
The Booth machine was about the size of a refrigerator and required two people to operate.
As you note, Richard, it was Hoover who introduced a portable, one-person machine suitable for ordinary home use. An impecunious inventor named Spangler patented it in 1908 (it looked like a cross between a bagpipe and a breadbox), but a few months later sold the rights to Mr. Hoover, a manufacturer of leather goods.
But pity not Spangler, whose financial problems were permanently solved. He became Hoover's superintendant of production. Hoover, in turn, contributed inspired efforts to establish a dealership network and a public awareness of the new invention.
The vacuum cleaner supplanted what had been the only significant improvement in floor-cleaning technology since the invention of the broom.
I refer to the carpet sweeper. Numerous people had made a sweeping device, and patents go back as far as 1699, but Bissell perfected it in the 1876.
The Bissell sweeper was so hugely popular that "to bissell a carpet" became a common phrase. (See? This does get back to the subject of verbing nouns.) Queen Victoria ordered several Bissell sweepers for Buckingham Palace.
In 1889 when Mrs. Bissell took over the company upon her husband's death, she became the first female head of a major U.S. business.
Trialoging, Quadraloging, Quintiloging....Yes, I am easily duped. I was all excited that I'd learned some new words, until of course I checked Onelook. I used "dialoguing", but it still just didn't seem to work.
quote:Originally posted by shufitz: In 1889 when Mrs. Bissell took over the company upon her husband's death, she became the first female head of a major U.S. business.
Well....you're probably right. I thought that Sarah Winchester owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company following the death of her husband in 1881, but...a little research reveals that Bill left her only 50% of the shares. Sounds like a recipe for deadlocked shareholders meetings!
Duncan, I should have made it clear that I was relying upon a single website, one I have no particular reason to believe to be reliable. But I just now dug a bit further, in embarassment, and found the same claim on Bissell's corporate site. However, a biography of Mrs. Bissell (click to appropriate subpage) emphasizes her success and skill but does not claim that she was the first.
Getting back to verbing of nouns, this from today's Wall Street Journal:
quote:Louis Michel, Belgium's Harley Davidson-riding foreign-affairs minister, has a quality unlikely in a diplomat-in-chief: He enjoys being undiplomatic. Big Loulou the Lip, as he is known, helped cause the biggest NATO rift in the alliance's 54-year history. The platform has won him popularity, and not only among Belgium's 10 million people. Mr. Michel is an improbable hero in the Arab world too. But his diplomatic gaffing also has gotten him into trouble.
shu, I looked in AHD and found that gaffing in this sense is slang, but it is a verb. The meaning that I liked best here was: "3. Slang a. To take in or defraud; swindle. b. To rig or fix in order to cheat." I find this fits right into the text you quoted. Anyone else?
Posts: 1412 | Location: Buffalo, NY, United States
quote:"3. Slang a. To take in or defraud; swindle. b. To rig or fix in order to cheat."
That verb comes from gaff and the primary meaning is To hook or land (a fish) using a gaff.. A gaff is defined as A large iron hook attached to a pole or handle and used to land large fish.
The word that the author of the cited piece is trying to form into a verb is more usually spelt gaffe, and it means A clumsy social error; a faux pas; or A blatant mistake or misjudgment. The dictionary gives no examples of this usage, in the sense of "gaffing" meaning making an error. It would therefore appear to be a new coinage. It is ugly and unnecessary in my opinion, but since any noun in the English language can theoretically be verbed, not wrong in a grammatical sense.
Agreeing with all arnie says, I was suprised to that the two senses are related.
Arnie notes gaffe = 'social blunder' and gaff = 'a hook to land fish; to land a fish with that hook'. It seems that the former gaffe traces back to a french word for 'boat hook'.
P.S. I just found that the coinage is not entirely new. Here's a witty example from 1996.
If you want to sound learned when you rail against (or even approve of) the verbing of nouns, a useful word to use is anthimeria. (Greek: "one part for another"). The use of a word of one class as if it were a member of another, typically the use of a noun as a verb.
Not so often now, but frequently when I was younger, "gaff" was used in the following context: "What's the gaff on Jim?" or "I got the gaff on that rock concert next week." Broadly speaking, "gaff" meant "information".
I read the following in a book by a British author. Is this the norm, and I've missed it? Or, is it a British use of the word? I see that "resile" is in the dictionary.
Originally posted by Kalleh: "Top FDA officials bigfooted the decision in 2004 to deny over-the-counter sales of the pill, known as Plan B."
I don't even know what bigfooted is supposed to mean in that sentance. Bigfoot is a mythical PNW creature, though the Wikipedia article indicates a greater range.
Now I am confused. I really don't know. I have reread the editorial, and it doesn't seem to make sense. I had thought it meant "stomped on," but that doesn't make sense. They are supporting that 2004 decision to deny OTC sale of the Plan B drug...they aren't "stomping on" the decision. Here's the article, though you will have to register for the Tribune, I believe (it is free). What do you think?
