to cloakroom

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 3, 2012, at 2:07 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

>
> At 3/3/2012 10:10 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>> his looks like a verbing of a compound noun (the noun "bone
>> transplant" in this case).  my files have, inter alia, the following
>> transitive verbs:
>>  backstory, target-practice, mommy track, tea bag [several
>> senses], jailbreak, sandbag, cloak-room [from Dorothy Sayers!]
>> plus intransitive "sunset".
>
> I am intrigued by what the verbing by Dorothy Sayers of "cloakroom"
> meant.  Turning a room into a place for cloaks?  Putting a cloak into
> a room?  But I suppose this is not surprising -- when she got to the
> juicy bits, she wrote in French.

why don't you try searching yourself?  here's my cite:

Ann Burlingham e-mail 7/27/09:

I think you collect verbed nouns? One caught my eye while reading Dorothy Sayers's _Whose Body?_: a character says he "cloak-roomed" his bag.

Google gives 76 hits, at least 2 from Sayers.

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