Friend Request Prompts Reflection on Grammar

One of my professors friended me on Facebook over winter break.

Such an action carries with it certain social ambiguities, and as I pondered whether I should friend him back, I started thinking about the concept of friending in general.

Then I started thinking about the word. Isn’t “friend” a noun? How did it suddenly become a verb?

With the rise of Internet networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, the act of adding a contact to your list of friends, or “friending,” has become common parlance. People talking about their Facebook profile are sure to talk about who they have friended recently. I use the word myself. I friend, you friend, he/she/it friends.

Officially, this is known as verbification, or verbing. Verbification is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action of converting a substantive into a verb.” Wikipedia enlarges on this brief description, saying that it is a form of word derivation and pointing out that it is extremely common in colloquial speech, as well as in specialized jargons. In fact, there are a host of verbed—and yes, the word for the action is yet another example of its existence­—words that are so common that nobody even notices. They merge lanes, they diet, they sex things up, all without getting caught up on the grammatical incongruities of these gender-bending verbs, which all started their grammatical existence as nouns.

A lot of verbification is the result of the necessity of coining new phrases to describe new technologies. Not only can people now friend, fax, e-mail, and text everyone they know, but they need new words to describe their activities.

“Verbing weirds language,” according to Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. And it’s true—there’s something a little jarring about “friending.” It sounds strange. It’s what George Orwell referred to in “Politics and the English Language” as a “verbal false limb,” something which “saves the trouble of picking out appropriate words and nouns.” Friending does not sound like it would appear in anyone’s deathless prose. It’s not your grandmother’s verb.

Or is it? The OED, on further consultation, yields up a listing for friend as a verb, with a first usage in 1849, and a listing of friending as verbal noun in 1602, in Hamlet. Your prose, or verse, can’t get much more deathless than that. It seems that verbification has been around a lot longer than MySpace.

But verbification is responsible for monstrosities such as “concretize” (the act of making something concrete), or “workshopping” (what you have to do when you are in a creative writing class). It is a sister-phenomenon to such line-jumpers as “hopefully” (an adverb that everybody thinks is an adjective) and drape (a verb pretending to be a noun). It seems like it only causes jolts and jerks in the smooth ride of good writing. Words should stay in their proper categories and not practice identity theft.

Yet the fact remains that verbs that were once merely nouns are an inextricable part of the way we talk and write. English is slippery, and, like any language, it evolves. The evolution of language cannot be controlled, no matter what the Académie Française may think, and new words and phrases are being added all the time. Although products of verbification and other grammar category benders often sound bastardized and awkward, they are unavoidable. (I just used two in the last sentence.) They are not bad grammar in principle, although words like “categorize” may still have grammar snobs turning up their noses.

I still haven’t decided whether I should friend my professor back.

chloe.smith@columbiaspectator.com