When ‘verbing’ goes horribly wrong

When ‘verbing’ goes horribly wrong

One of my younger daughter's teachers described English as “three languages in a trenchcoat, pretending to be one language” – and therein lies the problem for many second language speakers.

But it also means it's incredibly malleable – and the phenomenon of “verbing” is an excellent example of that. One of its great strengths is that it’s able to fluidly change nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, nouns and verbs to adjectives, and adjectives into nouns and verbs.

If we look at the phenomenon of “verbing” – i.e., turning non-verbs into verbs, many people will raise this as a pet peeve, when in fact it's a fairly common practice, and I'll wager they do it themselves. When it’s done well, it does a great job of filling some gaps in the language and providing nuance and meaning.

Don't believe me? Here are some common examples:

  • host a party
  • pencil something in
  • seat an audience member
  • oil a cog

The reasons many people will list this as a peeve (and, full disclosure, I may or may not be one of them...) is that one of the places you come across a million instances of bad verbing, is in business. It’s not just that the verbing is inelegant; it's that it reinvents the wheel and makes up these clunky words for words that already exist.

  • Let’s logic this (Let’s analyse this.)
  • Who will action these three tasks? (Who will do these three tasks?)
  • We should showcase our products. (We should display our products.)
  • We'll be onboarding new employees today. (We'll be inducting and orientating new employees today.)
  • We need to solutionise this problem. (We need to solve this problem.)

I'm sure you can come up with many more.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I'm not going to tell you that you should never use them, because quite honestly, who am I to tell you what to do?

I am going to suggest however, that if you're tempted to indulge in some verbing, maybe stop to ask if there's a simpler, more elegant – and already existing ’ word that you could use.

Will your word make it easier or more difficult for your reader or listener to understand you? Will it still make sense to someone reading it in five years when the current crop of business slang words has moved on?

Most crucially, what would be the best choice for your audience, even if it grates the very last nerve of people like me?

Those are all important questions to ask, but that last one is the most important. Whenever you communicate, you should always be trying to do the very best for your audience – so that your message lands the way you intend it to.

If the clunky verb is going to aid understanding, then by all means use it. But don't just use it on autopilot. Really understand who you are talking or writing to, and what they need to get from your message.

And as a final note, you can take this too far. My friend Cath and I uttered a barrage of expletives yesterday that I won't repeat here, since this is a family channel. Why? Because someone, somewhere, is advertising something called "strateteering". Even Google was stumped when I typed that in.

Brent Spilkin

The CEO Whisperer. Business coach and strategist to creative, advertising & technology entrepreneurs and leaders in the US and South Africa.

1 年

Im a straterteerist.

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