Action some verbiage chaps

So there's nothing I enjoy more than tackling pedants because English is a living, vibrant language and most of its speakers write it much more fluently than the pedants would have them believe.

Today, I saw a common complaint about using "action" as a verb. Well, I'm here to tell you that's fine and here's why, and it's not even a new thing in English.

First, English is jampacked with words that can be either nouns or verbs. I'll list a few.

Look, view, debate, list, act, murder, kill, light, fire, bolt, flick, fling, love, like.

There are many more. There are even words that are also adjectives:

You wrong me, sir.
You have done me many wrongs.
You are wrong about that.

Verb, noun, adjective, and in spoken language, adverb (You did it wrong).

So there's no problem with words having two purposes. We have been doing that for centuries. Of course, there are other ways to make nouns from verbs ("nominalisation"), such as using the gerund as a common noun ("meeting", "running", "footing"), adding an ending ("hatred", "flight"), changing the ending ("belief"), or even both ("action" itself) and of course sometimes these processes had already happened in Latin or French before we borrowed the words (many of our nouns are from the accusative of Latin nouns that were derived from verbs).

But "action" is a formation the other way. This process ("verbalisation") also happens in languages, although it's somewhat less common (and there's an interesting thesis, I think, in why it seems verbs are more "primal" than nouns, at least in Indo-European languages). In English, the ending "-ise" is commonly used to verbalise nouns. Consequently, we have "realise", "theorise", "incentivise". And interestingly, "incentivise" was frowned upon early in the last century as a neologism.

So it's actually an interesting process, adding "action" to the first group "the wrong way round". There are words that already went through the process, although you may not recognise that they did, for instance "function", "machine", "fund". Wait, what's this? It does seem as though we've been using nouns as verbs for a long time in English! "Function" as a verb is thought to be from the 1840s, for instance, and "fund" as a verb is so well established that we use its gerund, "funding", as another common noun.

We also do that with the rather less common "functioning", which means something slightly different from "function". And that's important. English has adopted a noun from French, then verbalised it, and then nominalised again, to create shades of meaning that are impossible in many languages. And most speakers of English can use all of these without any problem.

When you action a proposal, there is no straight translation. It means "act upon" or "put into action". It's a brilliantly concise word. In a hundred years, no one will think twice about using it, any than they think twice about "exchange" (formed as a noun and then verbalised, just like "action") or even "hump" (yes, a verbalised noun).

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:46 pm