06 November 2007

And an Amusing Addendum

PS – I recently noticed that I apparently picked the right title for this blog. There was a mermaid in the Sea of Azov at some point (and by “a mermaid” I mean “a tabloid story about an alleged washed-up mermaid”), and now a few people a week find my blog by Googling «азовская русалка.» So it's a good thing I've clarified that I'm not a mermaid; wouldn't want to confuse anyone.

And by the way, if you verb a proper noun like Google, do you end up with... a proper verb? If so, is that a relatively new animal, or are there older examples of such neologisms that I just can't think of at the moment? And is it still called a neologism if it's just a recategorization of an existing word into a different part of speech?

Ok, I'm done wasting time now. Over and out!

5 comments:

Luke Thomas Smith said...

I think that people's tendency to capitalize is inversely related to their actual willingness to use the word as a verb ... "borking," for instance, usually appears in all-lowercase even in contexts clearly related to the Bork nomination. I never cap "photoshop" when I use it as a verb (a lot). Also, when something becomes a general verb ("google" is still not; you can't google something on ask.com) that's about when the trademark loses validity anyhow. (Can you photoshop something in the Gimp?)

I think that "neologism" basically means "anything people actually say that we're too embarrassed to include in our dictionary without comment." So whatever.

Mike said...

You're far too close to the Balkans to overlook Balkanize! Actually, I don't know it that is always capitalized...

Rosa said...

Xerox?

Also, your mother commented on my blog, which I find adorable/hilarious.

Celine said...

According to my dictionary, balkanize, islamize (very popular to certain politicians these days), and I'm guessing google as well, have no capitals... Yes, I checked ;-)

Leslie said...

Well, Balkanize (which my dictionary capitalizes, Celine – diff'rent strokes, I guess) isn't quite the same thing, because it's taking a noun and adding a verbal ending instead of just reinventing it as a verb. But sort of the same deal – the newer ones (Balkanize) seem more likely to be capitalized than the old ones (bowdlerize).

If "to Balkanize" means "to do the same thing that was done to the Balkans," and "to bork" means "to do the same thing that was done to Bork," I wonder why we got "to bork" and not "to Borkize"? Probably just the fact that "Bork" sounds more like a verb than "Balkan," huh?