NOUN VERBing
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Good morning. Your Republican nominee has been up all night rage-tweeting. pic.twitter.com/mL1ovBY1bm
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) September 30, 2016
I'll leave the psychology and politics of rage-tweeting to others — my concern is its morphology.
English is happy to form NOUN VERBing combinations where the noun is the logical object of the verb: table thumping, slogan shouting, bird watching, garbage collecting, … And similarly, NOUN VERBer compounds involving the same sort of relationship: cup holder, coffee maker, gate crasher, screen saver, … Using tensed-verb forms of these phrases seems to require another step of derivation: "?We bird-watch every weekend"; "*Let's stand up and slogan shout".
Rage tweeting seems to be the -ing form of a compound verb "to rage-tweet" — however, rage isn't the object of tweet, but rather a more loosely connected characteristic of the tweeter. So what are the boundaries of formations of this type? Can we combine (for example) random mental-state nouns with random communication verbs? "Joy-screaming", maybe — but "exasperation-responding"?
The specific phrase "rage tweeting" was Out There several years ago.
[link] 3/12/2012: The choice to go with another male ancestor over a female is also going to have some Desmond-ites rage-Tweeting, I’m sure.
[link] 2/13/2013: You don’t even know why you downloaded it to begin with… a friend told you it was interesting, or you saw some friends rage-tweeting about it… but Flappy Bird is as much of an enigma to us as it is to you,
[link] 7/29/2013: Today during the CBS executive session at the summer press tour, CEO Leslie Moonves wanted the letter-writing, rage-tweeting fans to know it was the star's choice to leave.
[link] 8/7/2013: Unless you're a celebrity, don't waste your time rage-tweeting the airline.
[link] 9/24/2013: The result was an epic bout of rage-tweeting, much of it about how awful the main characters Mark and Roger are, and how minimal the show’s self-awareness is.
And "rage texting" seems to have started about the same time:
[link] 2/29/2012: Omg I was rage texting my dad to phone the producers and make them make more seasons X'D
[link] 7/19/2012: Rim wants your friends to know when you're rage texting.
[link] 11/29/2012: I really like(d) him and I'm tired of waiting but I don't want to end up rage texting him on why he isn't texting me.
There are certainly older NOUN VERBing or NOUN VERBer formations where the noun is loosely connected to the situation rather than straightforwardly the object of the verb: "power walking", "binge eating", … And it's well known that in NOUN NOUN compounds, the first noun can have almost any imaginable relationship to the meaning of the whole — hair oil / peanut oil; song bird / game bird, …
But it's not clear to me whether things like rage tweeting and binge eating are a recent innovation, or have been part of English morphosyntax since forever. There's probably a literature on the topic that I don't have time to find this morning, and with luck someone will tell us about it in the comments.
Martin Eberl said,
October 2, 2016 @ 8:19 am
Well, Wiktionary at least is also aware of the somewhat vulgar "hate fuck". (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hate_fuck).
To "rage quit" has long been a staple in the vocabulary of the gaming community, describing someone who quits a game due to anger over what transpired within it (usually somehow losing the game).
This jstor article (http://daily.jstor.org/more-on-internet-neologisms-rage-quitting-is-a-thing/) on the topic also has stress cooking, angry cleaning, humble bragging and ugly crying (though the latter two aren't quite the same).
However, all of these seem like (comparably) recent examples to me. I haven't yet found one that goes back to before the internet age.
P. Haggerty said,
October 2, 2016 @ 8:24 am
Maybe it's similar to "Drunk Dialing"? (which in turn seems to be related to Drunk Driving")
[(myl) More similar to "pocket dialing" and "butt dialing" — "drunk dialing/driving" is ADJECTIVE VERBing rather than NOUN VERBing…]
dfan said,
October 2, 2016 @ 8:47 am
"Rage quitting" certainly feels like the origin to me and was the first "rage ___" I thought of. There are a couple of Urban Dictionary entries on it from 2010.
The other recent similar phrase that comes to mind is "hate watching", to watch a TV show that bugs you and then complain about its faults endlessly.
Martin Eberl said,
October 2, 2016 @ 8:52 am
So the underlying construction here seems to be "perform action denoted by verb while in the mental/emotional state denoted by noun".
If so, things like "angry cleaning" or "drunk driving" would be a slightly different category, as the states here are described by adjectives, which is a slightly more conservative use of the categories, isn't it?
Brett said,
October 2, 2016 @ 8:59 am
In "rage quit" (which is definitely the progenitor of this kind of form), it always seemed to me to be slightly ambiguous whether "rage" was a noun or a verb. This added to the what made the phrase catchy.
Andrew (not the same one) said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:09 am
There is also 'drink driving', which may not be exactly parallel, but does, like 'rage tweeting', involve the use of a noun ( I think – could it be a verb?) which does not denote the object of the action.
Jon Lennox said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:11 am
The first thing that comes to mind for me is "joyriding", which is old enough a compound to have closed up into a single word.
It's not quite the same, though, since there's such a thing as a joyride, whereas I don't think I'd use the noun phrase a *rage tweet.
Zeppelin said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:51 am
"Drink driving" has always struck me as strange (in fact it feels ungrammatical to me — surely it should be "drunk(en) driving"!). Is "drink" supposed to be a noun or the verb here? If it's a verb, are there any other "VERB VERBing" phrases of this kind? Or is it a shortening of "drinking and driving"?
DaveK said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:09 am
Jon Lennox–
"This wasn't Trump's worst rage-tweet, not by a long shot." Seems perfectly cromulent to me, but that, like "joyride" is really a NOUN-NOUN.
Ari Corcoran said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:32 am
What about "piss taking"? Certainly a pre-Internet term, though not sure if it is in the same category as rage tweeting.
Ben Zimmer said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:58 am
I discuss the history of binge-Ving formations (and binge-V back-formations) in this Word Routes column.
As for hate-V(ing), see our treatment in the Summer 2013 installment of "Among the New Words" in American Speech. Our focus there is on hate-watching, but we also note the spinoffs hate-reading and hate-listening, as well as the precursor hate-fuck (dated to 1966 in Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word).
Walter Underwood said,
October 2, 2016 @ 11:00 am
How long has "stress eating" been around?
Andrew (not the same one) said,
October 2, 2016 @ 11:07 am
'piss taking' is taking the piss. What it actually means is a mystery, but formally, 'piss' is the object, so that fits the regular form.
As for 'drink driving', I think it's not actually the same as drunk driving; if you take any alcohol before driving you are drink driving, but not necessarily drunk driving.
Rodger C said,
October 2, 2016 @ 11:45 am
I've seen "drunken driving," though I think mainly in PSAs and the like. I don't think of it as normal English.
"Grudge fuck" is at least 45 years old.
Bruce Rusk said,
October 2, 2016 @ 12:03 pm
Isn't "sleep-walk" formed the same way? Sleep-walker and sleep-walking go back to the 18th c., per OED, but it only dates the bare verb to 1923.
Ray said,
October 2, 2016 @ 1:36 pm
my personal sense is that this formation came about when online forums did. expressions like "concern trolling," "shame baiting," "vanity posting," or "guilt laughing" became common, to express feelings or states of mind as actions in an asynchronous, text-only environment, and perhaps these formations made it comfortable to come up with expressions like "rage tweeting," "hate watching," "shade throwing" or "virtue signalling"… I wonder if it's all connected somehow to using emoticons to "tag" communications with the appropriate emotion — so that we even get things today like "cry laughing" and "humble bragging"?
Alex Dodge said,
October 2, 2016 @ 1:41 pm
Might it be that this is licensed by the verb "rage", not the noun? That would explain why "rage tweet" is okay but not "joy tweet".
Also: drink drive, sleep walk, binge watch…
These could be taken to mean: tweeting while raging, driving while drinking, etc.
JS said,
October 2, 2016 @ 1:46 pm
Surely not new with interwebs. I am in an exercise state of mind, apparently, and am thinking of things like speed walking, power walking, race walking, power lifting… yes or no?
JS said,
October 2, 2016 @ 1:57 pm
Never mind… this was mentioned in the post :(
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 2, 2016 @ 2:19 pm
Ngram Viewer dates "guilt tripping" to the early 1970s, and "vanity publishing" to the 1920s.
Rodger C said,
October 2, 2016 @ 2:36 pm
"Guilt tripping" is a back formation from "guilt trip," and it refers (or did originally) to someone who imposes a guilt trip, not suffers one.
Chris C. said,
October 2, 2016 @ 4:23 pm
When the story of these tweets hit the news, I knew there had to be a term for this kind of thing. I just couldn't bring one to mind.
Elonkareon said,
October 2, 2016 @ 4:32 pm
The noun(-)noun compound rage(-)tweet predates the verb by at least a year:
http://www.inquisitr.com/130350/50-cent-dr-dre-psycho-leaked/
http://therealtimereport.com/2011/10/31/customers-complain-on-twitter-why-do-71-of-brands-ignore-them/#comment-675088544
This matches up with my rather naive intuition that the noun being verbed in "rage-tweeting" is the entire phrase rage-tweet, not just tweet.
Elonkareon said,
October 2, 2016 @ 4:42 pm
(cont) Or rather they both came into use around the same time (based just on Google results), but the examples I've found of the noun version are slightly older. Before that the phrase "tweet rage" was in vogue, though I don't personally recall hearing or reading that one before now.
GH said,
October 2, 2016 @ 5:17 pm
The OED traces "panic selling" to 1875, and "panic buying" to 1907.
Martin Eberl said,
October 2, 2016 @ 6:00 pm
"Drunk" in general seems to be quite productive in this regard: there's drunk driving, drunk dialing, drunk texting…basically anything you shouldn't do while drunk is conceivable in this combination.
I am also wondering if "pleasure reading" qualifies, as it isn't really doing X while under the state of Y, but rather doing X to induce Y.
Martin Eberl said,
October 2, 2016 @ 6:06 pm
(cont) Then again, "pleasure read" as a verbal construction seems to be pretty rare, and is probably a backformation from a noun+nominalized verb "pleasure reading".
Bloix said,
October 2, 2016 @ 6:07 pm
Sight reading (to play a piece of music from the sheet music, without having heard it) appears, according to ngram, to have come into use in about 1880.
Rebecca said,
October 2, 2016 @ 6:56 pm
Hand knitting (handknitting, hand-knitting) seems to have appeared around 1840, but took off a few decades later (per google Ngram). I'd imagine the industrial revolution had something to do with that. I wonder if it will now give way to "artisanal knitting". (But maybe "artisanal X" has been shamed into hiding)
Enrique said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:03 pm
Thematic relations of instrument, time, manner, etc., in verbed noun+noun or noun+verb compounds:
to daydream 1840s
to snowshoe 1850s
to hand-wash [clothes] 1920s
to machine-wash 1960s
to handwrite
to happy-dance
participial examples
awe-struck
homemade
maidhc said,
October 3, 2016 @ 12:30 am
joy-riding
jay-walking
cake-walking
GH said,
October 3, 2016 @ 1:15 am
If "speed" counts, it's pretty productive for this kind of construction:
speed skating
speed reading
speed dialing
speed walking
speed dating
…
GH said,
October 3, 2016 @ 1:27 am
Oh, and how about "manhandle" and "mansplain" (blending "man" + "explain")? Or "catnapping"? "Force feeding"?
Yods said,
October 3, 2016 @ 4:08 am
@Bloix
This is off topic, but my experience (based on years of music exams) is that sight reading doesn't mean play without having heard, but play without practicing beforehand. More like at-first-sight reading.
Joe said,
October 3, 2016 @ 7:04 am
@myl: more similar to "pocket dialing" and "butt dialing" — "drunk dialing/driving" is ADJECTIVE VERBing rather than NOUN VERBing
It seems to me that the "rage tweeting" formations consist of NOUNs that had been ADJECTIVEd to modify NOUNs that are subsequently VERBed. So, "rage" is a modifier rather than an object in "rage tweet" which, in turn, became VERBed. Since the function of "rage" is not a NOUN but an a ADJECTIVE in its first transformation, it retains it prefix position when "tweet" becomes VERBed.
As everyone else pointed out, this isn't something new and we can't blame the interwebs on this one.
Randy Hudson said,
October 3, 2016 @ 8:08 am
Note that bout of rage tweeting was set off by his being called on his fat shaming and race baiting.
Bloix said,
October 3, 2016 @ 4:10 pm
Rebecca – and hand weaving dates to no later than 1827.
Are we on topic, though? Are we supposed be looking only for [mental state noun][verb] or is any [noun-not-the object of the verb][verb] responsive?
JPL said,
October 3, 2016 @ 4:57 pm
Although the N-N classifier construction is certainly a possible interpretation, this example struck me as resembling serial verb (V-V) constructions in creole languages (and African languages), where "rage" would be interpreted as verbal. In SL Krio, e.g., "i veks teyk" would be interpreted as "She/he took (it) with anger." (So, "He tweeted with rage".) (A range of semantic relations are possible between the elements of the serial verb construction.) (I only said "struck me as resembling", I don't (yet) say it "is" that.)
ajay said,
October 4, 2016 @ 5:34 am
'piss taking' is taking the piss. What it actually means is a mystery, but formally, 'piss' is the object, so that fits the regular form.
It was originally "taking the piss out of [someone]" – as in, deflating them, undermining their self-regard. (cf AmE "full of piss and vinegar" – plenty of aggressive confidence and energy). So "are you taking the piss out of me" became "are you taking the piss".
Umberto Eco has the Piedmontese phrase "ma gavte la nata" in "Foucault's Pendulum" meaning "take the cork out" which comes from the idea that someone who is being vain and over-confident is literally inflated, and if you remove the cork from their backside then the air will come out and they will return to a more realistic frame of mind.
David Marjanović said,
October 4, 2016 @ 7:42 pm
English is becoming more like German, then. Noun incorporation and similar verb-compounding phenomena have a certain tradition here, though we haven't reached Lakhota levels just yet.
The first of the rage- compounds may have been *ragepuke* (a sound effect rather than a verb at first), the act of involuntarily puking out of rage, which some people actually do in meatspace.
Tom V said,
October 7, 2016 @ 4:51 pm
Drink driving is the standard Australian term for what is called driving under the influence or driving while intoxicated (Texas) in the US.
Pretty much the equivalent of drunk driving.