| ஒத்திசைவு | प्रत्याह्वय | resonance |

“Mere verbiage,–it is not worth a carrot!
Why Socrates or Plato–where’s the odds?–
Once taught a jay to supplicate the Gods,
And made a Polly-theist of a Parrot!”
— Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845)

All the renouned  nouns of yesterdays (leave alone yesteryears) are being assaulted by hordes of verb evangelists, and are flattened to deliver verbs – this you know, is the current ing thing.

This sudden flash of remarkable insight occurred to me a few days back; and, therefore, of course I was suitably incited to write this rant. Sorry.

You know, lately I am getting more  confused than ever. Having been part of a muddle management layer (um, I mean, the top layer) of a company that was a normal software disservices outfit, till recently – which was suddenly MNCpated and became part of glowball brand, I get to talk to all kinds of HR honchos who strut about like virile peacocks (IMO, in any merger and/or acquisition scenarios, it is the HR group which tends to get benefited a lot, any idea why?).

These HR chappies have suddenly started uttering such erudite and ‘in’ nonsense such as goaling, goaled, goalable, goalitude, goalistic etc etc… It is truly and verily galling, to say the least. But then, if this trend of verbombing is going to continue, how am I (as a self appointed führer of verb police) going to grapple with this new reality? This state of affairs made me ruminate over the issue.

Has this become a global trend? Oh! Would there be no nouns left in the world excepting the names of individuals like you and I? Is this a process of genesis whereby, the original word was there and the word was actually a noun which subsequently became a verb and then inadverbently mutated and mutilated into a gooey mass of  past_perfect_future_bastardized verbiage… ad nauseam?

So, I decided to embark on an ambitious journey to find out why this has happened.

<lament>
O tempora, o mores!
</lament>

But then, I did not understand a whole lot – excepting the fact that English is so popular (in India, that is) because it is eminently mutable and locally adaptable and what not.

Also, I also have an excuse in the fact that currently I am under a terrible to pressure to deliver a variety of things at office and home. And anyway, it is so very easy to fake research.

So, to cut a looooooong story sht, I decided to follow an age old strategy.

It is very simple – I have chosen to join ‘them.’

As part of the initiation ceremony, I have tried to suggest a set of basic rules by which we can ease ourselves into this pit of verbiage from the heights of nouns.

Rule 1: If ing can be added to any verb, ADD it pronto.

Examples:

doing what – whating
going where – whereing
how to do * – howing
drinking coffee – coffeeing
flying (airplanes) – jetting
travelling by car – carring (though this is slightly jarring)
playing cricket – cricketing
…

Rule 2: If inging can reduce the no of letters in a verbizing activity (or) a series of activities, DO it.

Examples:

Being – aming
questioning – whying
making power point presentations – pptping
creating power point presentations – cppting
making mistakes and apologising – oopsing

Rule 3: If the verbized noun or its cousin (at least once removed) already exists in some other context, OBLITERATE the older meaning.

Examples:

Reading harry potter novels – pottering
Repeatedly falling for that desperate urge to post a rejoinder to every bloody mail that comes via a list – posthasting [or to adapt it to these current times of Twitter – Tweethasting – Editor]
Stealing office supplies to populate the home office – soshosing, sohoing
Surfing for personal benefit using office Internet connections – purfing

Rule 4: Find out the deprived members of the same noun hierarchy (up or down the tree) and if they are not verbized, do it to them.

Examples:

Breakfasting/Snacking is already in and so – going down the tree, try pizzaing, springrolling, cerealizing…
Wining is already there – so add rumming, beering, whiskeying…
All these kinds of nouns can be subsumed under fooding, for you higher level abstractionwallahs.

Rule 5: Take a popular noun within which there are various descriptor nouns as a family and morph the nouns into verbs.

Examples:
In cricketing, hitting a six (sixing or sixering), hitting a four (fouring).

In formula #1 racing watching – or forowatching. CouchPotatoing, PotBellyGrooming etc etc.

Rule 6: You can morph nouns to more specific and *new* nouns as per various applicability scenarios, and then gleefully verbize them.

Example algorithm:

In cricket – when some one gets ‘out’ – he is outed[1]. The one that gets out is an outee therefore the one that gets the outee out, can incidentally be called an outed[2]. Since there is a clash between 1 and 2, 1 could be rechristened as outeding. Simple, eh? The guy who gets outed is an outedee or an outee and the guy who outeds an outedee is an outadant.

One can keep on adding layers of specific_abstraction ad infinitum and this could a veritable game too. But then you should be interested in gaming and wording per se for this.

Rule 7: Start young. Take the specific case of children and inculcate the ability to verbize in them, even before they start verbalizing. Simple verbizing would be enough at this level.

Examples:

Reading books – booking (refer rule 3)
Parenting – childing
Packing bags – bagging
Dont do that – donting (ex: A child says – ‘my dad is always donting’)
Oh Gawd, why did you do *THAT* – ohgodding (ex: A child says – ‘my mom is always ohgodding’)

Rule 8: If there are punnable opportunities, GO for them – before some other useless punster grabs it.

Example:

Exhibiting new age luddism – such as irrational opposition to weblogs – mindblogging.

=-=-=-=-=-=–=

See, verbizing nouns is such a modern (and, um… fun) thing and hence I sincerely encourage every one to do this chicing.

Hoping this is helping.

Ramasaming, who is ducking.

PS: sorry for berserking.

PPS: As one of my ol’ acquaintances – Divya  pointed out:

And finally, let me point out that any noun that can be verbed can also be adjectivised. For example: “impactful”, “faffscriptic”, “oopsical” and “visional.”

JournalEntry: 11th June, 2004.