In praise of linguistic innovation

[Sibelan Forrester]

It seems that English verbs acquire new forms when they're used with 
distinctive meanings. A picture is hung, a person is hanged; the moon 
shone, but I shined my shoes. (Not particularly newfangled examples.)


On 10/8/10 12:01 PM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> John Dunn wrote:
>
>> P.S. I am old enough to remember the days when Rugby Union
>> commentators routinely referred to 'lines-out'; now only 'line-outs'
>> is heard, and while someone is sure to leap in to prove me wrong, I
>> suspect that the only surviving English compound noun that adds the
>> plural ending to the first part is 'procurator(s) fiscal'.
>
> In baseball, a batter who flies out is said to have "flied out," not
> "flown out," where "fly" is treated as a verbalized noun instead of as a
> verb proper. Similarly, a batter who hits a home run is said to have
> "homered," not "homed" without the nominalizing suffix "-er." Sports has
> many examples where nominalized verbs are then treated as newly coined
> weak verbs in their own right. Compare "commissioned" in the general
> language, where the noun form "commission" from "commit" is treated as a
> newly coined weak verb with the structure [[[verb]noun]verb].
>

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