How to verb

In a thorough memeification of a political candidate, Generation Z has declared Kamala Harris “brat.” She’s not just a brat, she’s brat. Which means … let’s go to the source of that meme, the British pop star Charli XCX. (The XCX apparently does not mean “1910” but “Kiss Charli Kiss.”)

Her album, Brat, launched Brat Summer. In her song “360,” Charli (Ms. XCX?) calls herself “a brat” when she’s “bumpin’ that,” taking “a little line” of, presumably, cocaine, while bumpin’ to the music.

Jeez I feel old when I exegesize song lyrics.

Anyway, Charli XCX projects an ethos of sassiness with a dose of fashionable vulnerability. Gen Z saw that in Kamala Harris’s notorious coconut speech with its weird laugh. Republican operatives immediately spread it online. And Gen Z backfired it. Harris is now, officially, brat.

When you change a noun (a brat) into an adjective (brat), you’re using Shakespeare’s favorite figure of speech, the anthimeria. The figure coined “memeification” and “backfired.”

I love the anthimeria, whose very nickname is “verbing”—itself an anthimeria. As Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame says, “Verbing weirds language.” (There’s that magic word again!) It lets you get all brat with your prose and song lyrics.

I’m including a passage from my book, Word Hero, that tells more. Meanwhile, Democrats shouldn’t expect a long half-life for the meme. Remember Dark Brandon?

---

---

Turning nouns into verbs is fun; you might find it surprising that most nouns remain virgins, as yet unverbed. Verbing often lets you say things more efficiently than if you used a standard dictionary. We once had a next-door neighbor who obsessed over his lawn to neurotic lengths. His lawn was sodded, greened, saplinged, lawnblown, chemicaled, and nitpicked to the point where a stray leaf, loosed from his pollarded and injected maple, would defy physics to make it onto my friendly, leaf-littered lawn.

Count the verbed nouns in that previous sentence. I hope it gave the impression of lawn victimization, with the guy’s poor yard subjected to loving abuse. What if I had avoided verbing?

UNWRITTEN: His lawn was laid down with sod, sprayed with green dye, planted with young saplings, blown with a leaf blower …

Not the same effect, is it? Not only does the description take longer, the lawn itself doesn’t seem … verbed enough. Verbing packs the action into every green, perfectly cut square inch.

Verbing nouns can make a slogan or expression sound witty. When the Italian car company Fiat introduced the minuscule Fiat-500, the American ad campaign bore the slogan “You are, we car.” The manufacturer offered “500,000 car combinations” to provide the perfect car for each buyer, thus coming close to physically turning a car into a verb. An active verb at that.

Which raises the question: When would you want to verb a noun yourself? Consider using the tool when you’re describing an unusual or extreme situation that lacks an existing verb to describe it—such as my obsessive neighbor’s lawn. Noun-verbing also can help you exaggerate a complicated process. Stick on mechanical-sounding syllables like -adize, and you can produce a rhyming list of words.

YOU: At the hospital I was chemicalized, IV-ized, doctorized, and nursasized.

Besides making splendid verbs, nouns also convert nicely to adjectives. That’s what Kevin Spacey did in The Usual Suspects. Playing a character named Verbal, Spacey described an obese man by turning a killer whale into an adjective.

VERBAL: The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin, big fat guy, I mean, like, orca fat.

You’ve heard the expression “rail thin.” Same thing, only with whales. But if we’re talking about anorexic models, “stiletto thin” might be better. In fact, verbing offers novel ways to describe people. Follow the aptly named Verbal by making your verbing as specific as possible; not “whale fat” but “orca fat.”

UNVERBED: He had a killer smile.

VERBED: He had a Doberman smile.

Here you simply compare a person’s smile to that of a Doberman. Instead of saying, “His smile was like a Doberman’s,” you do a sort of rhetorical Photoshopping, grafting the dog’s smile onto the person’s face. More effective, don’t you think? Use this kind of verbing—converting a noun into an adjective—whenever you want to go one step beyond a simile.

SIMILE: His fart was as loud as a firecracker.

VERBED: He had a firecracker fart.

SIMILE: His feet were the size of pontoon boats.

VERBED: He had pontoon feet.

SIMILE: The boardroom has a table the size of Butte, Montana.

VERBED: The boardroom has a Butte-sized table.

You might like the simile version better, which is fine. Figures give you a breadth of choices as big as God’s green Earth. Verbing alone can turn nouns into verbs, nouns into adjectives, nouns into adverbs (“Army Strong”), verbs into nouns (“She gave him a good eyebrow-raise”), and so on.

To come up with a good one, ask yourself what you want to emphasize most—subject? Verb? Adjective? How clever do you want to sound? (If the answer is, “Not too clever,” avoid verbing altogether.) Then try a variety of combinations to see if they work. Even the failures can be fun.

UNWRITTEN: I worked until I was thoroughly tuckered out.

FAILED VERBING: I worked until I got myself in a good tucker.

Ouch. What if you worked yourself into eyes-closed somnambulance instead? That’s a bit much, but I can understand the overwriting. You were really tired.

P.S. I’m posting frequently to build a small archive. In the longer run, you can expect a dose of soul bending a couple times a week.

---