Page 116 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

8.8.1 COMMON PROBLEMS WITH PROPER NOUNS

8.8.1.1 Writers who are trying to make their words sound important tend to

capitalize too many nouns. When editing your writing, take a close look at each
capitalized word. Is it really a proper noun? Do other people outside your
organization capitalize it? Most importantly, is it capitalized in dictionaries?

8.8.1.2 Did you notice that I italicized the names of some of the proper nouns in
this section? In most US style guides, names of newspapers, musical recordings,

television shows, movies, and museum exhibits are italicized.

8.9 Nouns into Verbs

Novice writers and amateur grammarians often feel, without being able to

clearly articulate why, that there’s something disagreeable about a noun turning
into a verb (or a verb turning into a noun), so they try to avoid using words that

have been formed in this way; however, without this morphological magic,
English would be an impoverished language. We shoulder blame. We table a

discussion. We google for answers on the Internet.

It is certainly easy to overdo it.
But almost all the peevishness about turning nouns into verbs falls squarely

in the if it’s new, it must be bad camp. It’s simply resistance to natural language
evolution. Many verbs in English have come from nouns, and yet the same few

words solicit the most complaint (such as impact), which suggests that the
peeves are being passed from mouth to ear like a virus. That is, there’s nothing

inherently wrong with a verb like incent (more than 150 years old), it’s just that
people have learned from each other to complain about it.

■ Some common nouns that have become verbs: friend: To choose

someone as a friend. At least 500 years old.
■ gift: To give a gift, or to give something in the way one would give a

gift. More than 500 years old.
■ phone: To call someone on a telephone. More than 100 years old.