“DRAFT: Those
Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns”
by Henry
Hitchings
[As readers of ROT will know by now, one of my overriding interests is good writing. I’m a recovering writing teacher, having attempted to inculcate the notion that good writing is an asset to everyone, no matter in what field you endeavor. I’ve taught writing, composition, or English at both the high school level and college, I’ve included an emphasis on clear, simple prose in classes such as theater appreciation and even acting, and I’ve tutored and coached writers and acted as an editor even beyond this blog. Pursuant to that goal, I’m republishing two columns from the New York Times here on a phenomenon that’s become all too visible in recent years. Read what writer Henry Hutchins has said about “nominalization” on the Times’ blog, “Opinionator.” The first column appeared on 30 March 2013 at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com.]
“Do you have a solve for this problem?” “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the take-away from today’s seminar.” Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?”
If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone.
Each contains an example of nominalization: a word we are used to encountering
as a verb or adjective that has been transmuted into a noun. Many of us dislike
reading or hearing clusters of such nouns, and associate them with legalese,
bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic
prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly,
obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly.
There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a
morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb “to investigate” produces
the noun “investigation,” and “to nominalize” yields “nominalization.”
Type B is known as “zero derivation”—or, more
straightforwardly, “conversion.” This is what has taken place in my opening
illustrations: a word has been switched from verb into noun (or, in the last
two cases, from adjective into noun), without the addition of a suffix.
Plenty of teachers discourage heavy use of the first type of
nominalization. Students are urged to turn nouns of this kind back into verbs,
as if undoing a conjurer’s temporary hoax. On this principle, “The violence was
Ted’s retaliation for years of abuse” is better rendered as “Ted retaliated
violently after years of abuse.”
The argument for doing this is that the first version is
weaker: dynamic writing makes use of “stronger” verbs. Yet in practice there
are times when we may want to phrase a matter in a way that is not so dynamic.
Perhaps we feel the need to be tactful or cautious, to avoid emotiveness or the
most naked kind of assertion. Type A nominalization can afford us flexibility
as we try to structure what we say. It can also help us accentuate the main
point we want to get across. Sure, it can be clunky, but sometimes it can be
trenchant.
On the whole, it is Type B nominalization that really
grates. “How can anybody use ‘sequester’ as a noun?” asks a friend. “The word
is ‘sequestration,’ and if you say anything else you should be defenestrated.”
“I’ll look forward to the defenestrate,” I say, and he calls
me something I’d sooner not repeat.
Even in the face of such opprobrium, people continue to
redeploy verbs as nouns. I am less interested in demonizing this than in
thinking about the psychology behind what they are doing.
Why say “solve” rather than “solution”? One answer is that
it gives an impression of freshness, by avoiding an everyday word. To some, “I
have a solve” will sound jauntier and more pragmatic than “I have a solution.”
It’s also more concise and less obviously Latinate (though the root of “solve”
is the Latin solvere).
These aren’t necessarily virtues, but they can be. If I
speak of “the magician’s reveal” rather than of “the magician’s moment of
revelation,” I am evoking the thrill of this sudden unveiling or disclosure.
The more traditional version is less immediate.
Using a Type B nominalization may also seem humorous and
vivid. Thus, compare “that was an epic fail” (Type B nominalization), “that was
an epic failure” (Type A nominalization) and “they failed to an epic degree”
(neither).
There are other reasons for favoring nominalizations. They
can have a distancing effect. “What is the ask?” is less personal than “What
are they asking?” This form of words may improve our chances of eliciting a
more objective response. It can also turn something amorphous into a discrete
conceptual unit, of a kind that is easier to grasp or sounds more specific.
Whatever I think of “what is the ask?” it focuses me on what’s at stake.
Some regard unwieldy nominalizations as alarming evidence of
the depraved zeitgeist. But the phenomenon itself is hardly new. For instance,
“solve” as a noun is found in the 18th century, and the noun “fail” is older
than “failure” (which effectively supplanted it).
“Reveal” has been used as a noun since the 16th century.
Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at
the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s.
“Ask” has been used as a noun for a thousand years—though
the way we most often encounter it today, with a modifier (“a big ask”), is a
1980s development.
It is easy to decry nominalization. I don’t feel that a
writer is doing me any favors when he expresses himself thus: “The successful
implementation of the scheme was a validation of the exertions involved in its
conception.” There are crisper ways to say this. And yes, while we’re about it,
I don’t actually care for “Do you have a solve?”
Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding
and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a
language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment.
Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make
about how to express ourselves—and in our assessment of other people’s
expression—but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant
in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic.
[A version of
this article appeared in print on Sunday, 31 March 2013, on page 9 of the
“Sunday Review” section of the New York Times.]
* *
* *
“DRAFT: The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns”
by Henry
Hitchings
[In his follow-up column on “Opinionator,” on
Friday, 5 April, 2013 Henry Hitchings continues his discussion of
verbs-as-nouns.]
In my previous essay, I wrote about nominalization—the deployment as nouns of words we mostly expect to encounter as verbs or adjectives. Aware of many people’s tendency to vilify this kind of usage, I speculated about the psychology behind it. I was interested in thinking about why someone might prefer “Do you have a solve for this problem?” to “Can you solve this problem?”
Like many of the readers who commented, I find that some
nominalizations are useful and others are jarring. I can accept that language
changes (and has to change) without necessarily cherishing all manifestations
of that change. I don’t shudder when I see or hear “This year’s spend is
excessive” and “Her book was a good read,” even though I can think of other,
perhaps more elegant ways of saying these things. On the other hand, “There is
no undo for that” strikes me as infelicitous, and I am still not completely
comfortable with the use of the noun “disconnect” as a synonym for “disparity”
or “discrepancy”—although it has been around since the 1980s.
In some cases a nominalization is the specialist vocabulary
of a particular profession or community: it has connotations of expertise and—less
often—of an insider’s self-regard. For instance, people who work in software
talk about the “build,” and I recently heard a real estate agent speak of
creating a “seduce” for property. When these terms of art gain wider currency,
it is largely because nonspecialists are eager to seem conversant with the ins
and outs of an esoteric subject. Sometimes we adopt such terms in a jocular or
satirical spirit—but end up using them without a whiff of irony.
In the last couple of decades, many condensed forms of
expression have achieved currency thanks to the spread of electronic
communication: when we bash out e-mails and text messages, we feel the need for
speed. Several readers made this point. Nominalizations allow us to pack the
information in our sentences more densely. This urgency comes in other guises:
nouns get verbed as often as verbs get nouned. (I had to go and lie down after
writing that.)
What I didn’t discuss in my first post was the dark side of
nominalization. It’s not just that nominalization can sap the vitality of one’s
speech or prose; it can also eliminate context and mask any sense of agency.
Furthermore, it can make something that is nebulous or fuzzy seem stable,
mechanical and precisely defined. That may sound like a virtue, but it’s really
a way of repudiating ambiguity and complexity.
Nominalizations give priority to actions rather than to the
people responsible for them. Sometimes this is apt, perhaps because we don’t
know who is responsible or because responsibility isn’t relevant. But often
they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved
in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics
and in business. They emphasize products and results, rather than the processes
by which products and results are achieved.
I touched previously on “What is the ask?” As an alternative
to “What are they asking?” or “What are we being asked to do?” this can seem
crisp. It takes an aerial view of an issue. But it calculatedly omits reference
to the people doing the asking, as a way of keeping their authority and power
out of the question.
At the same time, by turning the act of asking into
something narrow and impersonal, “What is the ask?” repositions a question as a
command. It leaves little or no room for the “ask” to be refused. As a noun,
“ask” is pretty much a synonym for “order.” Even when we retain details of
agency—as in “What is their ask of us?” – the noun ossifies what could and should
be a more dynamic process.
Compared with “What is the ask?” the question “What’s the
take-away from today’s lecture?” may look harmless. Yet it minimizes audience
members’ sense of their responsibility to absorb the lecture’s lessons. “What
should I take away from today’s lecture?” is a question that betrays a cramped
and probably exam-focused understanding of what it means to learn. But “What’s
the take-away?” seems to represent education as a product rather than a
practice. It invites an answer that’s a sound bite, a Styrofoam-sheathed
portion of spice, a handy little package to be slavishly reproduced.
Such phrasing also curtails the lecturer’s role, making him
or her not so much a source of ideas and a repository of intellectual trust as
a purveyor of data packets. This may be an unhappy accident, or it may be
strategic – perhaps a disavowal of the very notion that education is personal.
Nominalizations aren’t intrinsically either good or bad.
Yet, used profusely, they strip the humanity out of what we write and say. They
can also be furtively political. Their boosters see them as marvels of
concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a
specious and ethically doubtful simplicity.
[Henry Hitchings is the
author of three books exploring language and history, including, most recently,
The
Language Wars.]
* *
* *
“Watch your
language”
by Gene Weingarten
Gene defiantly recommends it
As the world’s leading connoisseur and curator of Bad
Writing on the Internet, I often get letters from people about some common
misuse of language that happens to annoy them. Most of these complaints are
pedestrian. (Yes, I know “ATM machine” is redundant. Zzzz.) But reader Amity
Horowitz just wrote in with an eye-opener. Coyly, Amity invited me to Google
the peculiar expression “defiantly recommend.”
“Defiantly recommend” has been used 1.5 million times! While
one might occasionally recommend something defiantly, at the risk of censure or
ridicule – say, the ritual eating of one’s placenta – how often would that sort
of thing happen? Not a million-odd times. So I investigated.
“Defiantly recommend” turns out to be a classic example of
Internet-induced idiocy, an elegant collision of incompetence and indifference:
A person wants to write “I definitely recommend,” in, say, a
product review but spells it “definately,” which is the illiterate’s go-to
version of the word. Spellcheck (and its co-conspirator, autocorrect) realizes
something is wrong and suggests “defiantly.” The incompetent writer doesn’t
know this is wrong or doesn’t care or doesn’t notice. And so “defiantly
recommend” gets published a million-plus times. A similar thing happens when
inept spellers write “alot,” meaning “a lot,” but spellcheck turns it into
“allot,” which explains the hemorrhage of Google hits for expressions like “I
have allot of weapons.” This phenomenon has happened more than 2.2 million
times, which is allot.
We will call this sort of thing The Law of Incorrect
Corrections, and it leads indirectly to:
The Law of Uninformed Uniformity
Before the Web, to be published as a writer, you pretty much
had to be a professional. Professionals are unafraid of words and know a lot of
them and take pains to use them in entertaining, unexpected combinations. This
is not so with many amateurs of the Web, who have much they wish to say but
lack the professional’s confidence and extensive arsenal of words. They are to
writing as I am to fashion: I know I have to put something on every day,
but I have no confidence in my ability to mix and match with style or taste.
And so I tend to dress in “uniforms”: safe combinations of familiar things,
such as khaki pants with blue shirts. The modern Web-sters are like that with
words. With words, they are … woefully inadequate.
Consider that very expression, a staple of the Internet. A
Google search confirms that 80 percent of the time the word “woefully” is used,
it is modifying the word “inadequate.” It’s difficult to explain how
preposterous this is, but I’ll try: It’s as though 80 percent of the time
people use salt, it’s on scrambled eggs. Think of all the missed opportunities
for flavor.
Finally, The
Principle of Trite & Wrong
Cliche is easy – it pops into the mind in an instant and
often sounds profound or at least comfortingly familiar. Therefore, cliche
infests the Internet, even when it is completely inappropriate to the point
being made.
Consider “nothing could be further from the truth.” This
expression is always a lie. Repeat: This expression is always a lie.
If we scan the Web, however, we find it has been used 13 million times,
generally in pompous defense of oneself or of another against allegedly
scurrilous allegations. Charles Colson, for example, once decried the popular
image of Martin Luther King Jr. as “a liberal firebrand, waging war on
traditional values.” Says Colson: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Really, now! I think I can refute this without getting into
a tedious discussion of a dead man’s politics. Here is one statement, for
example, that is palpably further from the truth: “Martin Luther King
Jr. was a subspecies of avocado.” See?
I could go on and on, but whatever I said about the
absurdity of the situation would be woefully inadequate.
[Weingarten,
a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is known for both his serious and humorous
work. His column, “Below the Beltway,” is published
weekly in the Washington
Post Magazine and syndicated nationally by the Washington Post Writers Group, which
also syndicates Barney & Clyde, a comic strip he co-authors. This
essay was originally published in the Washington Post Magazine on Sunday, 5 January 2014.]
[The following column was originally published in Parade magazine on 6 April 2014. It seems an appropriate addition to the foregoing columns on the craft of writing, so I’m adding it to this post as a comment, both to preserve Marilyn vos Savant’s explanation and to let her express for me a peeve of my own.]
ReplyDelete“ASK MARILYN: HOW DOES ONE USE ‘BEGS THE QUESTION’?” by Marilyn vos Savant
Would you explain how to use the expression “begs the question”? I know everyone is using it incorrectly, but I’m not sure how to do it right. --A. S., Somerset, Pa.
The English phrase “begging the question” is a descriptive (not literal) translation of the Latin term petitio principii, one of the logical fallacies identified and classified by scholars several centuries ago. The fallacy is also known as “circular reasoning”; it refers to the error of basing one’s conclusion on an assumption, often a form of the conclusion. “That begs the question,” is a complete statement. No question follows.
The phrase was first misused by unwitting speakers who were trying to sound learned, but as more listeners repeated the blunder, it became so common that the term began to acquire a new meaning: “raises the question,” followed by a question.
At this point, I recommend dropping the expression entirely, for two reasons. One, if you use it correctly, almost no one will understand you, and if you explain, you’ll sound pedantic. It would be better to use the term “circular reasoning.” And two, if you intend the newer meaning, why not simply say “raises the question”? It makes more sense and sounds better. Why “begs” the question?!
~Rick