"Wine-Barring" and Other Nouns That Just Can't Sit Still

In a piece about the de-funkifying of Greenwich Village, New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren transformed the noun wine-bar into a verb. 

Every time I walk across Eighth Street, I can’t believe what has happened to it — how one of downtown’s last reliably funky and ramshackle shopping streets has been utterly neutered, scrubbed and wine-barred.

You aren't going to find wine-bar listed as a verb in our dictionary, and there's a good reason why. Wine-bar isn't a verb. Or at least it wasn't until Lindgren decided it should be, transforming it on the spot and for no other reason than that it's easily understood and lends a bit of spice and descriptive muscle to his prose.

Linguists would label the resulting verb "denominal," which means a verb created from a noun. English is full of denominal verbs — you can dock a boat, dam a river, bench your star player —  and we're making new ones all the time because, like Lindgren just showed us, demonimal verb innovations sound unusual and new even though their meaning is readily understood by anyone familiar with the noun form.

During a recent Olympics, in an On Language column for The New York Times Magazine taking on complaints about podium's denominal transformation, Vocabulary.com lexicographer Ben Zimmer introduced a classic 1979 paper that appeared in the journal Language, "When Nouns Surface as Verbs," "in which Eve V. Clark and Herbert H. Clark cataloged hundreds of denominal verbs, old and new, organizing them into conceptual categories" that demonstrate why it is our brains are so easily able to make meaning from them.

Here's what the Clarks found: The verb podium's function in a sentence is to answer the question "where?" and thus belongs in the "location" category. Wine bar, which answers the question "what?" belongs in the "locatum" category. (Latin scholars will recognize these classifications as the vocative and accusative cases.) Our brains know what to do with these new verbs because we can easily graft the noun's meaning into a set of categories we've already internalized.

But, even though the system the Clarks uncovered shows us how we process these verb innovations without thinking about them consciously, they're still worth slowing down to examine. A word's part of speech can determine the difference between a right and a wrong answer on the SAT.

By the same token, you might want to check out lexicographer Orin Hargraves, linguist and teacher Neal Whitman, English as a Foreign Language teacher Fitch O'Connell and more from Ben Zimmer on the "nouning of verbs."