this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
10 points (91.7% liked)
English usage and grammar
365 readers
35 users here now
A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.
If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]).
Online resources:
- Cambridge English Dictionary
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
- Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. This is a great and witty reference about usage, its history, and its controveries
Sibling communities:
Rules of conduct:
The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.
(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Calvin and Hobbes was more popular 25 years ago though. Maybe its a more appropriate joke to say the same about "Google" and how to perform "Googling".
The actual English word for what's going on here is called a Gerund. In many cases, it is possible to unambiguously turn a noun into a verb by adding 'ing' on the end. After a while, people use the "Gerund" form more often (ex: I'm googling that idea), that they forget that the original word was a noun. After a few years of this, people remove the "ing" and now its a verb. IE: "To Google for information".
That is not quite what I'm getting at, but thank you.
"Fee" -> "Feed", as per your first example is this (non-official) tendency of American speakers to "Verb" words, as the Calvin and Hobbs comic puts it. The more official path is the Gerund as I said before. Fee -> Feeing sounds wrong and is uncommon. But other "nouns" can turn into verbs like Subpoena -> subpoenaing, or the Google -> Googling example of my earlier post.
So from the Gerund and the Noun-into-verb transitions, Fee -> Feed is somewhat correct. The problem is that it
Creates a Homonym, which is confusing. (Animal Feed is different from being issued a Fee)
Feed (defined as "to issue a fee") is not common.
So between #1 and #2, its a bad idea. So its seems unlikely to me that such a verbing would ever catch on.
Calvin and Hobbs pokes fun at this whole "turn nouns into verbs" thing by using the noun "Verb" and turning it into the verb "verbing". So everything here is common English, perhaps not how its been taught... but its truly how Americans use the language.
If a popular celebrity comes out 5 years from now and uses the word "feed" as in, to issue a fee to someone else, then our language will change. Its a very free-form kind of language, and its why our rules are so inconsistent. We are constantly copying the cool, the popular. It literally changes words, like the word "Literally" that means "figuratively" these days.
Or "No Way", which can often times mean "yes". We break rules and mix up words all the time, just as a meme and as fun. And it becomes official language when enough people do it.