[Ads-l] Nouning of "interactive"?

[Randy Alexander]

I'm pretty sure I've seen this usage in pre-internet CD-ROM days (1990's).

On Thu, May 16, 2024, 02:48 Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Nouning of "interactive"?
>
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>
> In today's news:
>
> "If you explore our interactive, you'll see that different racial groups
> experience different levels of gun violence." =E2=80=94 Robert Gebeloff;
> "M=
> apping
> 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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