[Ads-l] Nouning of "interactive"?

[Stanton McCandlish]

In today's news:

"If you explore our interactive, you'll see that different racial groups
experience different levels of gun violence." — Robert Gebeloff; "Mapping
Gun Violence"; *The New York Times*; 2024-05-15; "The Morning" column;
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/briefing/gun-violence-united-states.html

Here, "explore our interactive" is a link to a web app that presents an
interactive map. (Kinda wish I hadn't looked at it; as I suspected, I live
right on the cusp of one of Oakland's hot zones.) I suspect this was
intentional, since this was released over 8 hours ago, and the same phrase
appears in the corresponding email article (which differs from the web one
in various ways, but not at that spot).

This might just be a typo (a missing word such as "map"), or it may be a
deliberate development from the nouning of "creative". The latter has been
used since at least the mid-1990s as a mass noun (rather confusingly to
anyone not within a particular industry sector) meaning 'creative content
such as illustrations', as in: "My big contractor gig had me producing a
lot of creative for *Salon* and other major sites." There's also a
count-noun usage of "creative", in the same business environment, meaning
'those responsible for creative in the mass-noun sense': "The website
overhaul meeting was one long conflict between the creatives and the
bean-counters in marketing."

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