No Spin zone

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:22 AM -0400 7/7/09, Bill Palmer wrote:
>I'm not a regular O'Reilly watcher, so maybe this has been going on
>a long time...among the closing credits of this morning's broadcast
>(re-broadcast, maybe) was "Custom Shirtings by....")  Apparently "To
>shirt" is a transitive verb. Who knew?
>
Why transitive?  Why verb, for that matter?  I think I've come across
this -ing elsewhere, forming fancy nouns from plain ones.  I wouldn't
assume from this that any of the staffers had shirted the host or
guests.  Or perhaps this is a spinoff of the Franglais tradition,
where "un parking" is a parking lot (or the act of parking) but
there's no verb "parker" 'to park', or at least there didn't use(d)
to be--"parquer" might exist now alongside the usual "stationner".  I
seem to recall other such innovative -ing nominals in Franglais but I
can't recall any at the moment.

LH, noting that "shirted" earns one of my Eudora underlines while
"shirting" does not...

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