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New Verbing?

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 4:23 pm
by Slava
This one's new to me, at least. It's from a New Yorker cartoon, showing a woman running in a forest:
If you run a marathon in a forest, but there’s no one around to social media about it, did you really run a marathon?
My emphasis.

Have you seen this one earlier? How does one go about finding a first use anyway?

Re: New Verbing?

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 10:29 am
by bnjtokyo
Slava, I went to the Ngram viewer
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... irect_url=
It is a language tool supported by google that allows us to search a lot of digitised books.

I found you can attached tags to limit the search in various ways. i used the tag for verbs and found there are no examples in the google corpus for the phrase "social media" (or even "media" alone) used as a verb. So looks like you found the first one.

Re: New Verbing?

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 10:56 am
by bnjtokyo
I tried a general internet search on the phrase "can we social media" and found this
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afs ... 85768.html
dated August 14, 2016
There is a heading part way down the piece "How can we social media to build relationships?" but it might be a typo for "How can we USE social media . . . ."

Re: New Verbing?

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 1:09 pm
by Slava
Thanks for digging into this. It's fun to witness a birth.

Re: New Verbing?

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2018 12:39 am
by Perry Lassiter
Whether to convert nouns to verbs is a long running argument. I remember first bumping into it in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series. Wolfe has strong opinions about words. One that stands out is his repeated stance of abhoring the use of "contact" as a verb. Today, it's almost essential, as there are so many ways to communicate. I can phone, text, email, FB Messenger, visit personally, or see them at Lions Club. So often, I need a general word to say I will contact them, but don't yet know how.

In relation to the prior post, "social media" can become a variable or place holder for "I will tweet them," or email, etc.