this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
805 points (97.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
6661 readers
1851 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Since when is vague a verb?
"Edit" and "access" also weren't originally verbs. Same with "babysit" and "eavesdrop". Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.
Edit: This isn't directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I'm always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of "correct" (yuck!) grammar.
Did you Google that?
Nope, I can do this all day. Other fun examples of backformation off the top of my head are: "to burgle" from "burglar" (which the Brits still get mad about (note: this is incorrect, see conversation below)), originally from the Latin agent noun burglator from the verb burgare; and "cherry", backformed from Old French cerise, which was reinterpreted as a plural (even though it wasn't one), and then a new singular form was backformed. The same thing happened to "pea" (though that's a native English word) - you can still see the original "pease" in the old nursery rhyme: "Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in a pot nine days old".
I was making a joke with a modern example of a noun being verbified, but thank you for your insight.
Oh wow, I'm feeling very whooshed at the moment. Sorry about that.
can't be wooshed if the joke wasn't funny. I'm like you, spontaneously going into long rants on linguistic fun facts. most people ignore me. I enjoyed your brief history on verbification
We don't get mad about burgle, that's just a normal word. I do remember thinking I'd gone insane the first time I heard someone unironically use the word "burglarize" to mean "burgle" though!
Ah, yep, you're absolutely right, it is "burglarize" that gets y'all riled up. That's what I get for going off memory and not checking my sources. I've edited my comment above to point out the error.