I’ve noticed a lot of nouning lately. You know, taking a verb and turning it into a noun.
Regular readers know where I stand vis-à-vis the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide, so it should come as no surprise that I find this practice deplorable.
Now, I’m not talking about gerunds; I mean when people say things like “I got an invite to the party,” or “I looked through the photos and made some selects,” or “That’s a pretty big ask,” or “Dude. Epic fail.”
Descriptivists like to talk about language evolving to suit changing needs, but, in each of the above examples, a word already exists: invitation, selections, request, and failure, respectively. Clearly, there isn’t a need.
It must be more efficient to use the noun forms, then, right? Hardly. You’re removing a single syllable. Way to go.
So…what, then? Ignorance, I’m thinking. Or maybe it’s just an attempt to sound hip. Problem is, you end up sounding like you’re trying to sound hip.
