Professional Verbs

I was interested to discover that a number of things I have done professionally have no verbs. How did we ever get anything done? (Although, I also find it interesting that I've worked at times as an "engineer", whose professional noun is exactly the same as the verb of the professional activity, "to engineer".)

It also occurred to me that many names of occupations are agentive forms of verbs for the characteristic activity: weaver, cobbler, driver, cleaner, writer, robber, teacher, and so on. But there are some occupations, like chemist, where not only is the name not an agentive form of a verb, but in fact there's no verb at all for the characteristic activity. What a chemist does (I guess) is to apply the science and technology of chemistry to practical or theoretical problems — but there's no verb for that, no "chemicize" or "chemistrate" or whatever.

[Mark Liberman, "Professional verbs", Language Log, 31 December 2009.]

Perhaps there is no verb for what chemists and physicists and biologists and mathematicians do because — wait for it — nobody knows what they do? Actually, one could say that one principle activity of all of them is "research", although that doesn't really address the problem.

Posted on January 15, 2010 at 18.15 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Laughing Matters, Such Language!

3 Responses

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by chris
    on Saturday, 16 January 2010 at 20.25
    Permalink

    Perhaps there is no verb for what chemists […] do because — wait for it — nobody knows what they do?

    OI! knockitorff!

    I know exactly what I'm doing, thankyouverymuch.

    I am NOT, actually, pushing back the frontiers of science in research in the conventional sense. I spend my time teaching.

    [I'm reminded of Colin, one of my TAs, trying to get his students to get out of the labs in time: "All right you lot! Science faster!"

  2. Written by Bill Morrison
    on Monday, 18 January 2010 at 11.49
    Permalink

    Wouldn't that be "scie faster"? Which would mean, cognatively speaking, that Jeff "physes" — which we already knew anyway.

  3. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 at 20.23
    Permalink

    I once had a co-worker who, when heading for the john, would tuck a section of the newspaper
    under his arm and mutter, "research," to no one in particular.

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.