Short shot #29: a big give

More on the nouning front, continuing the theme from recent postings on the nouns open (as in “a cold open”, here) and quit (as in “your next quit”, here) and harking back to a Language Log posting from last year on the noun ask (as in “a big ask”): the noun give, which got some press last year thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s (short-lived) reality series Big Give, in which contestants (supplied with a considerable amount of money) vied for the title of America’s greatest unknown philanthropist.

There are quite a few sites devoted to giving challenges and reports of gifts and using expressions like “a big give” and “a huge give”, as in these comments here:

Giving gifts instead of receiving gifts for your birthday … someone else on here said they started doing that, and I think it is an awesome idea.
It’s cool that you got a huge give from a stranger …

simply wonderful!!! what a good man and a loving give to a stranger.

super birthday present and give!

Some of these sites use all three of the nouns gift, give, and giving, and sometimes present or contribution as well. These might be subtly different in meaning.

(OED2 has a noun give, but in the sense ‘a yielding, giving way’, a nouning of the verb give ‘yield, give way’.)

Short shot #28: your next quit

Caught in an television commercial this morning, the expression “your next quit”, referring to your next attempt to quit smoking. Fair number of occurrences of this expression on the web, for example:

To make your next quit the last, learn everything you can about the process — yes, quitting is a process — before you take your last puff. (link)

The same site also has “My Quit Place”  and “every quit attempt”.

The nouning quit isn’t new — the OED (draft revision of December 2007) has cites from 1918 on — but this use seems like a specialization of the sense given by the OED (where it’s marked as U.S.):

The action or an instance of quitting, spec. of leaving a job or of departing a place. Also a person who quits.

On the noun watch

A nouning, open (in a cold open), and a mass-to-count conversion, a slang ‘a slang word/expression’, that recently came to my attention, plus a digression on the nouning reveal and a bonus find of new uses of lingo.

sauced

Ann Burlingham has written to report on a conversation with a co-worker who asked about sauced meaning ‘drunk’. When Ann told him that the word was soused, he maintained that he’d never heard that word (or the noun souse) in his 32 years of life.

But sauced ‘drunk’ is all over the net, though not in OED2 (which has only the sense ’seasoned, flavored’) or NOAD2 or AHD4. It is in the Random House Dictionary (2009) and at least one slang dictionary, Spears’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (4th ed., 2007).

Given the noun sauce ‘alcoholic liquor’ (slang, originally U.S., attested in OED2 from 1940 on), occurring in idioms like on the sauce and hit the sauce, sauced meaning ‘drunk’ makes a lot of sense. In fact, it could arise in two different ways.

Short shot #20: California + ify

Suppose you want to convert the noun California into a verb meaning ’cause to be like California’ or ’cause to be like Californians’. English has several productive schemes for N-to-V conversion, among them (all examples made up so as to make them parallel):

zero derivation (direct conversion): They are trying to Manhattan Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ize: They are trying to Manhattanize Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ify: They are trying to Manhattanify Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ic-ate: They are trying to Manhattanicate Palo Alto.

Zero derivation is the least satisfactory of these alternatives, because it allows for such a wide range of interpretations, but the other three are causative. My impression is that -ic-ate is by far the least frequent formation for N-to-V innovations (though it’s not really possible to search specifically for innovations). But -ize and -ify are both frequent in this function.

Both -ize and -ify are somewhat uncomfortable with bases that end in a vowel, especially an unaccented vowel, especially schwa (as in California); Californiaify is awkward indeed, though there are a few hits for it, like this one:

How is my lil’ Californiaified-​Akronite doing!? (link)

Usually the base is simplified to some degree. Here’s Californiafy from Paul Krugman’s NYT column on November 9 (“Paranoia Strikes Deep”):

… what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

Or, more often hiatus is avoided completely by further reduction, in Californify:

At any rate, not only am I Californified, but apparently Pico is too. The dog that used to race out into the rain has developed some pretty refined tastes when it comes to weather … (link)

Anna Friel has been…Californified? Okay, that’s not even a word — Californified! Hah. But really, how would you call it? (link)

Note the recognition in this last quote that the verb is an innovation.

publicate

Ian Frazier, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece “Scratch and Sniff” (October 19, p. 30), about police dogs that sniff out cell phones:

Captain Matthew Kyle: “We don’t want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. It’s an organic substance that’s in all cell phones–leave it at that.”

What caught my eye was the verb publicate ‘make public, advertise’ (a verbing of the adjective public via suffixation with -ate), which I didn’t recall having seen before. Was it a recent innovation?

Well, you probably know where this story is going to go now.

Bags

Ad for Chex Mix: “a bag of interesting”. The phrase is even trademarked.

This is an adjective zero-converted into a mass noun — an instance of a larger pattern that Neal Whitman (summarizing earlier discussion) posted about a while back, under the heading “Buckets, Boxes, and Bags”, about

bucket/box/bag of awesome [Adj] / fail [V]

and related expressions conveying high degree (of awesomeness and failing, in these examples; of interestingness, in the Chex Mix case).

The ‘large amount’ or ‘high degree’ component of meaning is contributed by the head noun – bucket, box, or bag in these examples, but others are attested (see the comments on Neal’s posting): bowl, bottle, world, shipment, etc. (often modified by high-amount adjectives like big or giant). The converted words are affectively marked, as positive (interesting, awesome) or negative (fail as above, awful in the following example).

Steve Jobs would call this a bag of awful.

(an allusion to Jobs saying that Blu-Ray is “a bag of hurt”).

A few more words about extended senses of bag, in addition to uses with nounings. There are uses with ordinary partitive complements (of + NP), to sum up a state (cf. bundle):

Jethro had turned into a bag of bad temper. He would be eight next week and his big brother had promised to take him deep sea fishing when he was that old. Now Thomas said he was too small to go! (link)

Apparently she freaked the mediums out and some of them actually demanded she leave. One relayed the message that “she was a bag of bad energy,” and that her aura was telling the spirits to “back off.” (link)

And ‘large amount’ uses with partitives, similar to such uses of bunch, pile, and the like:

At least your wife will have something to show for shopping. She will NOT be acquiring a bag of bad habits, at the end of your bad dream vacation. But you will [in playing golf], I guarantee it. (link)

Finally, there’s an insult that was new to me (and to comedian Louis CK, who riffs on it in this video): “Suck a bag of dicks!” (conveying, roughly, ‘Fuck you!’).

(None of these uses of bag made it into OED2.)

More nounings

In my brief treatment of The Ants Are My Friends, I neglected to mention this bit from the book (p. 11):

There are panels throughout [the book] where I’ve put together similar examples or sources of mishear or mis-speak …

This has mishear and mis-speak as mass nouns zero-derived from the verbs mishear and mis-speak (try not to worry about the hyphenation). News to me, but then I’m always coming across new stuff.

Now I see that there are count nounings as well:

In any case, the number of syllables in “if you could close the gimmick” don’t match up with the audio. This is clearly a mis-hear. (link)

Just noticed what I think was a mis-hear: … (link)

At least Mrs. Bush can claim possible senility for some mis-speaks. (link)

SOME MIS-SPEAKS BY SPOKESMEN OF THE LORD (link)

Nouning marches on.

Short shot #11: haul-fail

From Virginia Heffernan, “Uploading the Avant-Garde”, NYT Magazine 9/6/09 (p. 15):

But what’s surprising is how little the home-made videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more – and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?). And the haul people and fail people evidently don’t feel underserved; they are helping themselves and creating what can only be called an art scene, all around the many, many videos of their genre on YouTube.

The relevant nouning of the verb haul has been around for some time; OED2 has an entry for

fig. The act of ‘drawing’ or making a large profit or valuable acquisition of any kind; concr. the thing or amount thus gained or acquired.

with cites from 1776 (Abigail Adams, “I think we made a fine haul of prizes”) on. But its use as a modifier, in noun-noun compounds like haul video and haul people, might be recent.

Nounings of fail do seem to be recent — and recently very popular in some circles. There’s been a lot of writing about both count uses, as in the top ten fails and fail blog ‘a blog about fails’ (parallel to fail video), and mass uses as well, as in a bucket of fail. See, among other recent items, my posting here, Neal Whitman’s posting here, and Ben Zimmer’s column in the NYT Magazine and his Word Routes column.

Now we get haul and fail together.

Short shot #9: a tough get

[I'm several days into suffering from a dreadful intestinal virus, which among other things has deranged my nights. I've been playing KQED on the radio, to keep me company and absorb my attention. So I've picked up various odds and ends, from this source and some others.]

I’ll start with one from KQED’s Morning Edition this morning, where sports writer John Feinstein reflected on Rafael Nadal’s chances in the U.S. Open tennis tournament, saying “it’s a tough get”, meaning that the championship would be a tough thing for Nadal to get.

This is a zero nouning (a direct conversion) of the verb get. As with so many very frequent verbs, the nouning of get has been going on for a very long time, but not quite in this sense.