Verbing: I'll just missed-call you

I overheard a great bit of verbing in the pub yesterday evening:

I'll just missed-call you

(Two girls were swapping contact details. The first girl gave her mobile phone number to the second girl, who called that number and immediately hung up - allowing the first girl to get the second girl's number from the missed call.)

Back to work tomorrow, so these pub-based anecdotes will be coming to an end, I'm afraid.


PS. The cost of a pint last night: £1.60ish (it was a Samuel Smith's pub). Oh and sorry about the lack of pictures on the blog this weekend, but I've been using dial-up...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice word. ) Anyway, in the Russian linguistic tradition this would be called "conversion" and not "verbing", but it's nice to learn the conventional English term. )

TootsNYC said...

I love "verbing"--it's so useful, and you end up w/ lots of fun words and terms.

JD (The Engine Room) said...

Tootsnyc, I agree with you – but verbing is also responsible for some horribly ugly jargon and business-speak (in my subjective opinion). So it has to be used with care!

The Ridger, FCD said...

Verbing is the absolutely normal English method of making new verbs. Since we no longer have much morphology to mark a verb or noun - which is "hunt" or "bank" for instance? - what else are we to do? (I find it funny that many people who complain about it also hate -ize.)

JD (The Engine Room) said...

Ha, you've just reminded me of 'burglarize'! An Americanism that always makes me laugh (or should I say 'chucklerize'?)...