Ad Verbum

"Verbing weirds language", as Calvin famously put it, and, language purists notwithstanding, the phenomenon remains enthusiastically unquenchable. And a recent, rich source of weirdness has been the computer, and its infusion into mainstream culture - particularly true among hackers, who "as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language", but increasingly spreading to the populace at large.

There are a spectrum of uses like "my machine bluescreened again" and "I hear some script kiddie DDoSed the AOL webserver", where a computer-related noun (or noun phrase) has been verbed; I'll leave those to the Jargon File to document. What interests me more is the verbing of program names; the transition from "run $foo on it" or "$verb it with $foo" to "$foo it".

In unix, with its "culture of the word", such a transition is natural. Most unix commands take the form <command> <parameters> - "finger <user>", "ping <host>", "tar <file>" - corresponding almost exactly to the "<verb> <noun>" inputs of the minimalist text adventure parser. Of course, a good many programs went the other way around, from verb to command - ping, mount, mail, etc. - but there is a clear tendency to use commands as verbs when speaking: "tar up the files and ftp them over", "grep through your mail folder for the address", "sort and uniq the list".

Another important factor is the standardisation of file formats. Indeed, most unix programs are designed to work with plain text files, so that a variety of programs can use the same file as input. This leads to an orthogonality which greatly strengthens the "command as verb" paradigm - as with natural language, any verb can (syntactically) be applied to any noun. Contrast this with Windows, where every program has its own specific file format - rather than "Word a document", you "open up a document in Word". The "in" is significant - Windows programs aren't verbs, they're environments.

This environment versus verb dichotomy is evident throughout Windows - the standard workflow is task-and-program- rather than data-centric. You don't "$program a file", you "$verb a file in $program", where the verb is usually a generic one like 'edit' or 'view' - "edit the spreadsheet in Excel", "play the mp3 in Winamp". However, I can think of two notable counterexamples. The first, a carry over from the MS-DOS days, is 'zip', which has become not just a verb but practically a synonym for "collect into an archive and compress". Although this originated from the command line zip program, its survival is more due to its orthogonal, verb-like usage - zip is a *tool* which packs and compresses existing files, rather than an environment in which files are created and live.

The second, and even more impressive, example is Photoshop - "to photoshop an image" has become the de facto generic term for the act of touching up, or otherwise manipulating, an image file, despite Adobe's best efforts. It's hard to say why Photoshop alone, out of so many thousands of programs, made the crossover from noun to verb, but note that it satisfies the basic requirements of ubiquity (it's practically the killer app for home PC image manipulation), orthogonality (it works with most standard image formats) and tool-like usage (the common use case is manipulating existing images). And although it does, like most GUI programs, have an 'environment' feel to it (I'd definitely say "touch it up *in* Photoshop" rather than "with Photoshop"), once you're done the end product is again a standard image, viewable in any graphics program.

An interesting test of this theory comes from the fact that Photoshop has its own, native image format, .psd. And, were I sent a .psd file, I'd almost certainly "open it up in Photoshop", rather than "photoshop it". Photoshop here plays the role of any standard Windows program, and the phrasing changes accordingly.

There are two other classes of 'program' that have attained verbhood. The first is the instant messenger - when you need to specify a network, "MSN me" is heard far more commonly than "message me on MSN", though (possibly because it lacks euphony), "Yahoo me" isn't. Another possibility is that MSN is primarily associated with its messenger, whereas Yahoo! is more associated with its website, therefore one would have to say "Yahoo! messenger me" (and, contrariwise, "I read it on yahoo" versus "I read it on msn.com"). Note that the verb comes from the service, rather than from the client program, so we're stretching the boudaries of "programs that became verbs" a little. It can be argued that "to ftp a file" falls into the same category, particularly now that most people use a client that isn't called simply "ftp".

Stretching the boundary in another direction, we have the relatively new phenomenon of verbed websites. I can think of three sites that have made the leap - Babel Fish, Google and Slashdot. It is interesting to note the difference between the former two and Slashdot. Babel Fish and Google are essentially tools with a web interface - to 'babelfish' some text or a website is to run it through the Babel Fish autotranslator, and to google a phrase is to look it up using Google. The phrase 'to slashdot', on the other hand, refers to the fact that sites mentioned on Slashdot are often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of traffic driven their way - the so-called Slashdot effect.

More interestingly, though, the term has been used to mean "being mentioned on Slashdot" - "my project really gained in popularity after it was slashdotted" - a usage that throws into sharp relief the dual nature of the web as a front end to computational services, and as a dynamic publishing medium. Following the verbing of Slashdot and Google, attempts have been made to extend this usage to other, similar websites ("I got metafiltered", "onelook it"), but they sound slightly selfconscious, and haven't really caught on (possibly excepting livejournal - "to LJ something", meaning to post to one's livejournal about it, is fast gaining currency).

And where are the language purists in all this? Well, quoting John Lawler:
"'Verbing Weirds Language' only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds."

In other words, wherever they are, they're welcome to stay there. I'll take my language weird.
- posted by Martin DeMello @ 8:54 AM

 
Hello World

Hello, and welcome to my little spring of randomness.

Why a blog? Well, this one's primary raison d'etre is to motivate myself to write. More specifically, it'll serve as a series of baby steps towards my ultimate goal of writing popular science/maths, though topics won't be restricted thereto. Indeed, following Hofstadter's philosophy in Metamagical Themas, this blog won't be about anything; rather, it will be a strange attractor of my interests, defining and revealed by the random orbits of individual entries.

How regularly will it be updated? Realistically, not very - I'll try my best, but life has a funny way of intervening. I will endeavour not to just dash off entries for the sake of posting, and will definitely prevent the blog from degenerating into a series of uncommented URLs, tempting though they are to post.

There might be a biography at some point (watch the sidebar), but right now my primary audience is people who know me already.

Onward.
- posted by Martin DeMello @ 8:55 AM