Subject: Boughten - verb use Thu 12 Sep 2013, 17:13
This was seriously written in a Beeb PoV posting - and several remarked that that the construction was rural Hampshire. I came across children in north London who said 'us-un' for 'ours' and 'we'.......they also never cleaned their teeth and had waxy ears, but that is by the by. One of that lot had illiterate parents - as was he - and a strong determination to sustain it. So was it this odd usage because of that or has it a history? Applied logic in this instance is acceptable........
LadyinRetirement Censura
Posts : 3305 Join date : 2013-09-16 Location : North-West Midlands, England
I don't know about "boughten", Priscilla, is it a hangover from Ye Olde English? There are still occurrences were something is said to be "proven" rather than "proved". Then there is silly false medieval construction in what has to be one of the daftest made-up verses in a Christmas carol, "Ee'n so here below, below, let steeple bells be swungen, and "io, io, io" by priest and people sungen", the carol in question being "Ding Dong Merrily on High", which has remained popular despite the silliness of the words - only 3 and a bit months till the C_____ festival, folks. I have heard "yourn" and "hisn" in colloquial conversation - I've also heard "Her went" instead of "She went". I think it highly likely that the rural Hampshire explanation for "boughten" is the correct one.
Last edited by LadyinRetirement on Mon 30 Sep 2013, 19:00; edited 1 time in total
I'm very fond of cromulent words. "Epucious" is a personal favourite; it baffles people, who usually think it is of Greek origin. Apparently Woody Allen made it up.
PS "...leave Maryland after misinterpreting a passage from the Bible. Their destination? New Sodom."
Neologism is a splendid cromulation because spelling in that genre is irregular and therefore highly acceptable to those like me who find it a trial. Our new young voters who can, I assume, stand for parliament being enfranchised can set their skill to good use in important motions about laws that they don't like. Mobilisation would no longer mean getting troops into war; possibly meaning that phones are given to each new born and upgraded every 6 months for free. I can't think what the Speaker would have to say to bring them to order,
EDIT - Didn't know this (from one of the posts after the BBC article):
I like "meh" but I think it's from The Simpsons rather than from the internet. Lisa explains to Homer that her generation "feel neither the highs nor the lows". "What's that like?" asks Homer. "Meh", Lisa replies. It's a perfectly cromulent word that embiggens the language.
Also, didn't know that "unfriend" was first used by E. Nesbit (as a noun, not a verb) in The Railway Children. There's Humpty Dumpty's unbirthday too...
Meles meles Censura
Posts : 5081 Join date : 2011-12-30 Location : Pyrénées-Orientales, France
I'm concious that this is beginning to intrude on the daily rant territory but, whence came the use of nouns as verbs? This usage was discussed at the time of the Olympics when the expression 'to medal' was everywhere and it popped up in front of me again today when I read a tweet (don't worry, I'm not a twit, it was quoted in the web site of an archaeological unit) that a particular feature had been 'ground truthed'. Truthed! Streuth! what's wrong with writing 'confirmed by excavation' or just 'found'.
Verbification (that's a perfectly cromulent word - see Wiki below) is all around us (blogging, texting, gifting, skateboarding, mothering etc. etc.) It's nothing new. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Language Instinct” (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries..."
Shakespeare was a fan, as was Gerard Manley Hopkins: WS has the Duke of York, in Richard II, say, “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, while GMH famously used Easter as a verb at the end of The Wreck of the Deutschland - "Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east...". Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.
I quite like "ground-truthed"; it's got a sort of Heaney/Beowulf feel to it. I could drag Richard III into this, something about the bards (ie Minette) "singing in their clear songs of a steadfast warrior king, who, ground-truthed now... " etc, etc. Perhaps not.
In English, verbification typically involves simple conversion of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb are themselves products of verbification (see autological word), and—as might be guessed—the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a change in form. (Verbing in this specific sense is therefore a kind of anthimeria.)
Verbification may have a bad reputation with some English users because it is such a potent source of neologisms. Although most products of verbification are regarded as neologisms, and may meet considerable opposition from prescriptivist authorities, they are very common in colloquial speech, particularly specialized jargon, where words are needed to describe common actions or experiences.
EDIT:
"I'll unhair thy head." (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, v.) "The thunder would not peace at my bidding". (Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, vi.) "Me, dictionary-ing heavily, 'Where was the one they were watching?'" (Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa) "'Let me not suppose that she dares go about, Emma Woodhouse-ing me!'" (Jane Austen, Emma)
Shakespeare was a divil for neoligisms alright, but didn't always hit the mark.
While there is no evidence that he co-marted with co-mates (friended or unfriended) while virgining terms it is undeniable that his uniquely forgetive skills often failed to dispunge lasting crants of mirable verbals. We can congree in fact that rigolds like bubukle and other demi-natur'd inventions never convived themselves on our tongues nor insistured themselves in the English language.
Everything you don't understand above is a Shakespeare neoligism that flopped.
As well as apparently inventing quite a few -ize verbs, Nashe seems to be have been very fond of using existing ones as well. The use of -ize verbs was quite rare at the time. Shakespeare only uses about thirty, and there is only one, baptize, in the King James Bible.
Yet in Christ's Tears alone, we have more than in the whole of Shakespeare, and in The Unfortunate Traveller, the number of -ize suffix verbs is almost equal to that of French-based -ise verbs, which was highly unusual for that time. This delight in -ize verbs doesn't seem to appear again until the middle of the eighteenth century.
Here are some of the stranger -ize verbs he uses. Those asterisked are probably his own invention.
Subject: Re: Boughten - verb use Sat 28 Sep 2013, 11:08
Michael Skapinker, writing in the FT, tells us of two new verbs created from the noun "incentive". They are apparently now popular in business circles. Copyright won't let me share the relevant article, but the vile verbs he mentions are " to incentivise" and the even worse "to incent".
Priscilla Censura
Posts : 2769 Join date : 2012-01-16
Subject: Re: Boughten - verb use Sat 28 Sep 2013, 15:55
This will lead to incentivness and incentivisation. - thence incentivisationess. These and similar linked with clichés will form the key speech for someone at a symposium on expenses filling a gap between tea and happy hour drinks - no one will be listening - and the content so foggy that there will be no questions but the quickly speaker lauded and thanked with loud clapping to awake those blocking the way to the bar. A local Nat West manager went to Edinburgh for a two hour jolly - on first class expense natch to be told nothing much but enough ot refuse her hardest working man on the client front, that no, he could only have one white shirt a year as uniform perks. This leads to nonincentivisationess, I conclude..... and also wonder if it is time to go out to the shed a d hang from a beam yet.
The US of A is the place to go to hear English being put through the shredder, no doubt a product of their multilingual immigrant heritage, but with amazing (and often extremely worrying) effects. One that springs to mind is when I "sat in" at a post-class faculty "dissection" of a history lecture given by a friend in the California State Uni campus in Sacramento. The subject of the lecture had been the first humans to make a home in the North Americas, the idea being to disabuse students from the word go (this was the first lecture of the course) of the notion that everything began with Columbus. My friend was being assessed in the process so was expected to keep quiet while her peers and faculty heads went through her lecture transcript (which I had helped to write). All was going swimmingly until we got to one of my words - "originate" - as in "we know that humans did not originate in the area, so how and when did they get here?". This caused a commotion. The faculty head said with real concern that this was not something for freshers to be told in their first lecture, after all humans originated all the time in North America, and were still doing it to this day. Feeling defensive of both my word and my friend I politely asked what the hell he meant?. A colleague then rather patronisingly explained to me that what my friend had probably meant to say was that humans could have had their origins, but not have originated, in North America. I sarcastically asked if it would be fair to say that humans had originalised outside of North America but then originated within it, to which I received a consensus of yes, but that it was better maybe just to say origined.
I was surrounded by people for whom the word "originate" suddenly meant "invent or innovate", and nothing else, and apparently only because the dean said so. This was frustrating and sad for English. But what was remarkable was the ease and willingness with which they actively participated in the invention of entirely new words rather than take the trouble to look up a dictionary, as well as the speed with which consensus was met. I am sure the dean would not have been overly annoyed at the challenge - he was an ok bloke - but to do so would have been more a challenge against that entire way of approaching language, which was obviously an ingrained and accepted part of social behaviour in these circles.
Of course their new words probably wouldn't last two seconds outside of that room. However that was not the point. The point was consensus within the room - even at the expense of language - and also the use of language, even mangled language, to reinforce the hierarchy of authority within the group. It was a great eye-opener for future dealings with people in the US and stood me in good stead when faced with situations where I was in similar groups, united by a common disregard for English but desperately impressed if anyone within the group imposed a consensus. I could originate with the best of them, and often did.
LadyinRetirement Censura
Posts : 3305 Join date : 2013-09-16 Location : North-West Midlands, England
When I was even younger and more beautiful than I am now, people used to "go to hospital"; now I hear "hospitalised" in the UK frequently. Some years ago I did (and passed fortunately) History A level at night school (I don't talk about my first attempt at school - at my first "go" I received a worse result than Philippa Gregory according to the PG - "should she be shot" thread [hangs head in shame]). But I digress. One lad was a bit of time-waster and asked what "saturnine" meant whilst I muttered "Look it up in the dictionary" under my breath. People in the UK can be too lazy to use a dictionary - not just in the USA.
I'm not sure whether I mentioned this in another thread, but one of my interests besides history is the disappearing skill of shorthand. I wrote an article in Pitman for some friends and wondered therein whether I could invent a word; I was thinking of "sluggery" as a combination of slugs and thuggery to describe the havoc the said molluscs had wreaked in the garden. I also made up some short dictation pieces for a friend; in one I mentioned a few feisty women from history such as The Lady of Mercia but stated that unlike the fictional "Xena, Warrior Princess" the Lady Aethelfleide did not have a discus (at the time I just could not think of the word for "frisbee").
Triceratops Censura
Posts : 4377 Join date : 2012-01-05
Subject: Re: Boughten - verb use Wed 09 Oct 2013, 13:33
"Yarbles...great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine"
Nothing personal, but a sample of Nadsat, the teenage language invented by Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange.
Gilgamesh of Uruk Censura
Posts : 1560 Join date : 2011-12-27
Subject: Re: Boughten - verb use Wed 09 Oct 2013, 17:48
Another Yuletide analogy "Adam lay y-bounden, bounden in a bond" or "Adam lay ibounden"
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