Month: November 2006

To blog, perchance to verbizize

As a recovering editor now working on the vanguard of the English language (aka the innerweb), I still have my relapses.

I’m not nearly as anal retentive about the use of AP style or proper grammar as I used to be. (Who has the time, in a deluge of info and under constant time crunches, to obsess over whether anal retentive should be hyphenated?) But sometimes my inner editor, in the immortal words of Billy Jack, just…goes…berzerk.

It happened on Monday,when one of our writers tried to slip “piecemeal” past me in a draft news release. The sentence read something along the lines of, “The workers piecemealed shim plates to run the length of the bridge.” Brandishing my red pen, I circled the errant noun-turned-verb and suggested she rework the sentence.

No less than 30 minutes later, though, I read in The Wall Street Journal an article about the usage of “gift” as a verb (“Especially During the Holidays, ‘Gift’ Is a Verb That Just Keeps on ‘Gifting’,” by Elizabeth Holmes, reprinted in today’s Arizona Republic). According to this story, the verbizizing (or “verbification,” if you prefer) of nouns is becoming commoner and commoner.

Holmes cites a few recent examples:

Users of Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes online store can “gift” songs and albums and videos to one another. Mondera, an online jewelry retailer, pushes customers to “go ahead, gift her” a diamond. Epicurious.com, a gourmet online food guide published by Conde Nast, features an entire section labeled “Thanksgifting.” Gossip Web site TMZ.com reported actress Angelina Jolie “was gifted” a diaper bag after the birth of her daughter.

The gift-as-verb contingent have history on their side.

[T]he mutation of noun-to-verb is fairly common, according to Geoff Nunberg, chairman of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel, which regularly surveys writers for their opinions on such issues. Milk a cow. Water the grass. Fax a document. [Or blog about nouns-turned-verbs.-ed.] Some experts estimate that as many as one in five verbs began as nouns, Mr. Nunberg says.

Oops. I guess I verbizize nouns more often than I thought. So I showed the writer this article, told her history was on her side, and encouraged her to follow her own best instincts as a writer.
I didn’t expect to run into more verbizizing on Monday, but when I turned to page 2 in our local newspaper, there was another one. In this case, a local public figure was quoted expressing her gratitude to the local university (that’s us) for granting her some space in which “to office.”

We are grateful for the invitation to office in this location, and we will work diligently to grow these relationships to the benefit of the community and the university.

Arrgghhh.

At least she didn’t say she was grateful that the university had gifted this space to her.

These college rankings are a joke

We know how seriously our deans, presidents and other top-level administrators take that annual beauty pageant known as the U.S. News college rankings. Every fall we endure the wringing of hands, the gnashing of teeth, the comparisons of our school’s scores with our competition’s, the complaints that our schools should be higher in the rankings than they are, because we’re better than University of X or College of Y.

You probably won’t hear any complaints from your boss if your school doesn’t show up on CollegeHumor.com’s 2006 Power Rankings. These rankings, released earlier this week, use a “highly scientific formula” to determine which schools offer “the maximum amount of fun” for “the least amount of effort.” The criterial includes:

  • Percentage of females on campus. “This is the only interesting statistic that the Princeton Review measures,” the editors proclaim. They also note that it could be misleading: “A higher number here may just mean more girls that won’t hook up with you.” So they also measure…
  • Percentage of females in a relationship. “Somebody from each school helped us determine the percentage of single girls on campus by taking a random sample of 20 females from Facebook, and letting us know how many were ‘in a relationship.’ To avoid tainting the data, sorority girls in relationships with their BFF4Eva’!!!s were discarded.”
  • SAT scores. The higher the average, the lower the CollegeHumor rating.
  • Number of all-male vocal groups. A deduction of 25 points for each all-male vocal group on your campus.
  • Bar closing time. The later, the better.

Unlike U.S. News and other organizations that keep their ratings formulae a secret, CollegeHumor posts its formula right out there on the internet. Here it is.

CollegeHumor.com Power Rankings formula

Now that you know what goes into the secret sauce, you can start working on how to bump your ranking for next year. Unless CollegeHumor follows the U.S. News model and changes the formula.