Verbing

There’s really only one thing you need to know about language, and it’s this (so listen with both your ears): nouns are cool. Yeah, you heard me (cause of that ear thing we talked about). Nouns. Are. Cool. Why do you think all the best bands are named after nouns? You think that’s a coincidence? Do you? Hmm? What? You do? Are you serious? You, my friend, are an idiot. There’s a noun for you right there: idiot. Learn it and use it to refer to yourself.

Nouns never go out of fashion. They’re part of the pantheon of eternal zeitguyst, along with drugs and not giving a fuck. Nouns are solid, reliable. They say, “here is a thing”. What’s more, they tell you what the thing is. It could be a dog, a toaster, or the Mayor of Sao Paulo, but you wouldn’t know without nouns. They’re the best kind of words by a long, long way. Adjectives are boring. Verbs stink. Adverbs sit there uselessly. Exclamations? Shit! There’s no two ways about it, people. Nouns are the bomb.

So wouldn’t it be good if we could get rid of all the other words and replace them with nouns? Duh… What are you, special? Of course it’d be good! Well, that’s what verbing’s all about. Take a look at this sentence:

“I’ll search for it on Google.”

Man, I yawned just typing that. Talk about your snooze-fest. “Search”? I mean, honestly, “search”? That is one boring verb. In fact, I’ve just checked on the tediometer, and according to the reading I’m getting, the word “search” isn’t just boring, it’s hella boring. We need to do something about it. Try this on for size:

“I’ll Google it.”

Now we’re talking. See how much better that is? We’ve halved the word count at a stroke. How? Verbing. The noun is always, but always, the best word in a sentence, so take that noun and turn it into a verb. Whoa, hang on. Don’t just “turn it into a verb”. VERB it. See? You can make pretty much any sentence cool. Or, to put it another way, you can cool any sentence. Yeah, now you’re getting it! Come on, let’s try a few more. If you can verb these sentences, you’ll be surfing the zeitguyst, so postcard me the answers.

1.) I’m going to clean it up with the hoover.

2.) Let’s process that image using Adobe Photoshop.

3.) I would like to write the word “fuck” on the side of a pig.


ZG