Strange Brew by John Deering for November 28, 2021

Verbing weirds language.

Just wait until he hears about “Illegals”.

For all things drift into the darkness and are gone forever from the world, in the fullness of time.

There is no noun that can’t be verbed.

I don’t like it when people noun verbs.

If it isn’t sensationalized, no one watches…

My fave is “tornadic”.

He’ll be heading back to 1895 rather quickly and be scarred for life. Some things just should not be seen.

Language isn’t static. Meanings and usage change over time. I have to admit that the yearly updates to Websters, OED, etc make me shake my head but there ya go. (and yeah. Weather people are the worst. LOL)

For everyone who objects to turning nouns into verbs, I’m assuming you’ve never:

drank a drink,

hammered with a hammer,

screwed in a screw,

fished for fish,

or shouted a shout.

There are many, many more. It’s hardly some new phenomena. All that you can do is object to new ones while you’re still using the old ones.

I couldn’t believe it when I moved to California and heard rainfall predicted in one-hundredths of an inch.

Wait until the news guy “times it out” for us. That drives me batty.

Or breezy for windy!

Sometimes it is rain with wind. Sometimes it is an event. Events require rescue teams, chainsaws, and shovels.

How about…Data, Media and criteria is? Last year I couldn’t spell journalist, and now I is one.

English uses denominative verbs all the time, indeed by the thousands, largely without morphological markers. There are such, as -ize, but they have more or less specific meanings. In some cases there used to be a specific verb form, like to nist “to make a nest”, or to milch “to get milk from a cow”, which has been lost.

An interesting feature of denominative verbs built to nouns is that the actual meaning is unpredictable—you just have to know that to skirt means “to go around or past the edge of”. On the other hand, denominatives built to adjectives are quite predictable: to yellow, to brighten, to soften, to coarsen, and so on.

The name of the protagonist of the The Time Machine was never mentioned in the book but was clearly not Wells himself.

802,701 CE. I’l go for More Lox.

why is this funny? i genuinely don’t get the humor. i understand the words, but i don’t see the joke