Kidnapping My Word

For months now, I’ve become increasingly annoyed over words that have been kidnapped from their rightful parts of speech and held hostage in another by today’s trendy usage.  

Two such words I find particularly irritating—particularly in the past tense— are:

• Friend (rightfully a noun) is now a captive verb, as in “I friended him yesterday.”
• Text (rightfully a noun) is also now a verb, as in “I texted him the party time.”  

Fuming about them, I began to realize that thousands of nouns have become verbs over the centuries, or perhaps it happened the other way around. Verbs such as move, help, read, love, run, walk, jump, drive, weed, bridge are all nouns, and nouns such as champion, chair, dance, hop, fan, sweat, bloom are all verbs. It’s possible to think of a hundred such words in a minute, or so . . . which means, I suppose, that there’s no point in getting upset.

For that reason, I’ve decided to give up the indignant ranting and make up some of my own. My newest one—and I have to say, I think it’s catchy—is to kidnap a pronoun and make it a verb.  “MY.”

Here are sample sentences.

 “After tasting a sample of the bakery’s croissants, I myed a couple for tomorrow’s breakfast.”

 “Once I eyed the red stilettos, I knew I had to my them.”  or—even more succinct, “I eyed them, then myed them.”

Feel free to kidnap your own words and shove them into different parts of speech. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll be known as the person who coined a particular term !