TO VERB, OR NOT TO VERB: THAT IS THE QUESTION

Language buffs, myself included, continue to be taken aback by the quality of most made-up words. John Updike, reviewing a novel in a recent issue of The New Yorker, quoted the narrator as having written: "She was unfresh", and "It was unso." Such feeble efforts render the most fluent speakers virtually speechless.

At the other extreme are unnecessary extensions of nouns. On a televised report about the misuse of prosac, a spokesman for the medical profession declared "Suicidality is the result of taking prosac." I move we "homicide" the elongated noun. Suicide is bad enough; there is no need to form a club.

Verbalizing nouns continues to be a favorite pastime of American speakers and writers. Did you know we can also verbify? Word maven Safire, in FUMBLERULES, advises us not to verb nouns. Although he uses the term in the same spirit in which we have used homicide, it makes as much sense as what everyone else is doing. The difference is in knowing better and getting this across to others.

In a newspaper account relating the tribal feuds among South Africans, we read: "More and more tribes are insurrecting." Insurrect is a back-formation of the noun insurrection. It is also another word we can do without. Mercifully, our dictionary-makers have spared us up to now.

Some weeks ago, we heard a panelist on a poetry special proclaim that Carl Sandburg's poetry combusts. Most of us think "Fog" when we think of Sandburg, but the comment brought the poet's well-known "Chicago" to mind. At first reading, "Hog Butcher of the World" seems anything but poetic, but Hog Butcher is only one of a variety of metaphors used to define the city. To these sensitive ears, combusts is neither pleasant nor adequately descriptive. Peace and good will also abound.

From a write-up in Time magazine some issues back, readers learned that "hundreds of screaming kids and their zombified parents" were protesting something or other. Or perhaps they were celebrating. I failed to record what occasioned the excitement I was too zombified by the verb. But everyone is familiar with zombie, the word if not a specimen; and the writer was probably laughing as he verbalized it, knowing readers would be equally entertained.

Somewhere, we read a scoop about a British sportscaster who announced that an injured athlete was "stretched off the field." Was the Englishman trying to Americanize his native tongue or was he only "tongue-in-cheeking" our incorrigible habit of verbing nouns? We have to grant he economized in creating "stretchered" for "carried off on a stretcher." Ability to economize is always a plus. Ask the U.S. Congress.

My nephew Gus, still a resident of Cape Girardeau but now stationed in Pensacola, Fla., enjoys "izing" words, but his fun is also satiric. He writes that he considers himself permanently "navyized", and laments that as a flight instructor in charge of other flight instructors he has also become "educationized." He hadn't planned on becoming a teacher, but there you are: Like father, like son.

No doubt Gus Lorberg (alias M.G. III) is up on all the educationese pervading his new office, but new barbarisms continue to sully the field. Somewhere in Missouri, a school system has announced a need to "reallocationize" money for education, and the teachers fear this may mean salary cuts for them. Cuts should be made in the verbal barbarisms committed by administrators and writers of school procedures and methods for achieving goals.

An article in a scholarly journal suggests three approaches for teaching writing to students: "concretization of goals, procedural facilitation, and modeling planning." Heaven help my nephew if he has to teach his charges basic English!

In a recent issue of the Central High Tiger, an aerobics student was quoted as saying no one ever teases him about his obsession with aerobics because everyone knows he can "out-aerobicise" any challenger.

Never mind that there are only two boys in the class and both are athletes. How many girls would have thought of turning aerobics into a verb? An athlete who is that aware of verbal trends deserves a spot in a column on verbing. Congratulations to John Crowell and to all readers and non-readers.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!