Word Invention!? and betterising ... stuff!

[Herman Munster]

Moving forward, the nuclear family is orientated outside the box thinking in our modern world. Cyberspace is not just for the geeks, today's upwardly mobile now generation place demands on social services with much greater impetus than we did b4 when we were poor. Global warming is the classic clash of modern technology which we have to embrace, clashing with old thinking. The temperature in every century has been modulating differently by the decade.

[simba major]

If we didn't invent words, we would have no words.

It's been going on since we first learned to throw rocks at each other.

And verbing nouns - a phrase which, itself, contains a verbed noun - are no new thing: the language is littered with them. It is a legitimate tool of language formation. Using "impact" as a verb makes your skin crawl? Then stop using "practise".

Trying to stop the natural evolution puts you in the comany of men like King Canute.

[simba major]

72 bottles of beer on the wall . . .

[Susan B]

Never mind this Shakespeare fellow, Bruno Mars made up the word 'conversating'. As in, 'while we were waiting, we started conversating.' That's just cheating. The verb is converse, surely?

[simba major]

I'd love to hear from an e(n?)tymologist.

I'll bet that we have lots of words in the language which we all accept as perfectly legitimate that arose from plain old mistakes.

Language, ultimately, arises not from logic but from usage.

[simba major]

Sixty-three bottles of beer on the wall . . .

God, I am going to get so drunk!

[leslee]

Bruno Mars made up the word 'conversating'

No, he didn't. It's an old slang twist on "converse." It's been around since probably the 1970s. At least, that's when I first heard it.

But Bruno Mars is talented just the same.

(Nice conversatin' witcha.)

[Keith .]

We've made fun of the "verb" conversate for years. My wife and I were watching trash TV (Maury, I think) and heard is used at least 6-7 years ago. I heard a teacher use it last week, swear to God, and I think it makes the speaker sound like a complete dumbass.

[leslee]

I like it.

[Liza B.]

Like, what about the constant misuse of the word "like" that seems to have infected the language?

The other day I counted how many people I overheard starting each sentence with that word or sprinkling it throughout their sentences while they were blabbing into their cell phones. Since practically every person in Manhattan is glued to their phone, it was a very large number.

It's, like, so totally annoying.