Ted's Blog

On one of the flashlight discussion boards I visit, a guy said he was going to buy some particular flashlight and gift it to a friend of his. Somebody corrected him and said that he should just say he was going to "give" it to his friend. Well, this is a global discussion and not everyone even writes English that well in the first place, so I didn't see much reason to post a correction, but whatever. It started a discussion about proper English and how people are abusing the language, often by turning nouns into verbs like in this example (though "give" doesn't always imply a "gift"). Then somebody else, referencing the forum's ability to post a multiple choice poll, said:

Maybe we should open a new poll: Is it okay to verb nouns?