I have just barely gotten used to Olympics sportscasters saying that so-and-so “medalled;” something I first heard from Bryant Gumbel in the late 1980s.
But this week, I heard a sportscaster say that an athlete hoped “to podium.”
The mind boggles.
Here’s another thing: Within days of Gumbel’s coinage, it seemed all of the NBC sports staff were using the same bizarre turn of the phrase. Was it an executive decision? Did NBC decide it took too long to say “won a medal” and so instruct its sportscasters to verbify? Or were the other sportscasters simply thrilled with Gumbel’s linguistic creativity and compelled to imitate him?
Perhaps we’ll never know.
Update: Hey look! The Language Log has a big fat post on this very coinage!
Words of the moo-ment
Things of herd
Homogeneous wish
Um…huh?
Not a recent development, for decades catchy phrases and ideas and being on the same page seem increasingly more important, culturally. There have been ongoing social tradeoffs since the sixties that most don’t more overtly name and discuss. Our society supports rebellion and activism less and less. It supports the reasoning that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about –and it supports that mentality to excess (it’s become part of the herd mentality). That’s why the following is humorous: http://www.bobharris.com/component/option,com_poll/task,results/id,114/?mosmsg=Thanks+for+your+vote%21
I remember a fuss being made over “nite” replacing the word night on many signs. That was in the 70’s? More people were more likely to question “cute” changes and a lack of standardized language.
What has become the more important standard? What social trade offs have been chosen? What meta-attitudes? Why is it that some (linguistic rebellion, in this case) is okay and cute, but other rebellion (usually political) is felt to be “passé??? and/or immature … as if it’s a sixties hippie thing?
While it’s true that we have quite a number of new words being introduced at an incredible rate, due to technological advances that touch our every day lives, it’s also true that some new words gain **such easy entry** due to the homogenous wish … that is the attitude and eagerness of “let’s all be uniform and smooth.??? This isn’t to say that people were ever free of the drive to follow fad and fashion. This is to say it’s eager beaver time.
People seem to question less and follow more, over all?
You might say I’m reading too much into it, but that’s my gut reaction.
Well, it’s certainly dense thinking, but I like that.
My reaction is that, while certain forms of “verbing” are elegant, most are symptomatic of an urge for everything to be easy, convenient, fast, and disposable. Someone decides it takes to long to say “won a medal” and so says “medalled.”
It also has a lot to do with the anti-intellectualism increasingly prevalent in our society (especially on the right). Who cares about words? What am I, some liberal elite academic artsy-fartsy intelleckchal?
I gave up years ago, when the football commentators started saying things like “They defensed ’em real good”.
But any excuse to quote Calvin and Hobbes is a good one……
Not sure how to take the “dense thinking” portion of your comment, but many trends do seem related to anti-intellectualism, among other things.
We might also be witnessing “misplaced rebellion” in that it’s considered okay to rebel linguistically but media or public personalities, **in particular**, literally can’t afford political or social rebellion much if at all. People will rebel somewhere some how. Today polite/PC/cute/catchy games with words are en vogue (and sometimes they are played to the hilt). They are the rage. Urbandictionary is fun.
Tradoffs…
Dense meaning, y’know, chewy, requiring effort to understand.
I disagree with your misplaced rebellion idea. I don’t think there’s anything rebellious about mangling language because everyone does it and only a disparaged minority (intellectuals) object. To be rebellious, you have to go against an established majority. When POTUS routinely mangles English, doing so cannot be considered rebelling against authority!