Names as verbs
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In a comment on yesterday's post "A 12th-century influencer", Laura Morland wrote:
Thanks for sharing "to abelard," the new verb of the month! Note to AP: the grammarians will insist that it be spelled with a lower-case "a". (Verbs are never capitalized, not even in German, I don't believe.)
This is one where The Errorist might have the upper hand.
The name most often verbed in English is probably MacGyver, and its verbal uses (almost?) always retain the capital letters. A few examples from the news:
[link] This PopSocket Will Help You MacGyver Your Way Out of a Pickle
[link] 5 Badass Female TV Characters In STEM (And An Instance They Have MacGyvered)
[link] Macgyvered Neck Brace Saves Rare Peruvian Grasshopper
[link] The Pinkbike Podcast: Fox's Gearbox, 'MacGyvering' Ultra Premium Bikes & Counting Chains
[link] ‘MacGyvering’ Inventorship – It’s Much More than a TV Trope
Merriam-Webster agrees; so does Wiktionary, though they give a lower-case version as an "alternate spelling". The OED as well:
And the BBC even wrote about it — "How'MacGyver' became a verb".
I didn't yet turn up a "grammarian" opinion on this, but I did find a scholarly paper on the history of the verbification process: Aurélie Héois, “When Proper Names Become Verbs: A Semantic Perspective“, Lexis 2020.
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Rodger C said,
June 12, 2025 @ 10:07 am
It out-Herods Herod. ("Out-herods" gets a red underline.)
Yuval said,
June 12, 2025 @ 11:49 am
But aren't those all titlecase?
Peter Taylor said,
June 12, 2025 @ 12:19 pm
My gut instinct is that to Google would be a stronger contender
Mark Liberman said,
June 12, 2025 @ 12:39 pm
@Peter Taylor: "My gut instinct is that to Google would be a stronger contender"
Good point. I was blinded by thinking only about verbification of personal names.
Jon W said,
June 12, 2025 @ 12:44 pm
No love for "boycott"?
Ernie in Berkeley said,
June 12, 2025 @ 1:02 pm
Gary Marcus is a cognitive psychologist and critic of LLMs. He posts in his Substack that somebody wrote "Apple just GaryMarcus'd LLM reasoning ability." Note the merger of the first and last names. Are there others with this pattern?
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-knockout-blow-for-llms
Cuconnacht said,
June 12, 2025 @ 2:18 pm
If an engine is dieseling, it is continuing to run after being turned off. Always with a lower-case d as far as I iknow.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 12, 2025 @ 3:29 pm
Amusing link from Ernie in which Marcus also coins "Subbarao (Rao) Kambhampati’d" (note spaces.)
Amusing parts (really relating to the cough hack "AJI" thread) being some commonsense talk about LLMs/LRMs and reference to (plus obligatory mockery of) the now-standard rebuttal: "but these systems are actually *more* human-like for their inability to solve simple problems PWND!"
Stephen Goranson said,
June 12, 2025 @ 3:57 pm
A related use.
Lyndon Johnson to William Westmoreland in 1966:
"I hope you don't pull a MacArthur on me,"
HS said,
June 12, 2025 @ 6:30 pm
As another example with a first and last name (though not merged together) there is Robert McNamara'd in the Paul Simon song title "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I was Robert McNamara'd into Submission". ("Philippic", though a noun rather than a verb, is of course similarly derived from a proper name.)
I wonder whether "Donald Trumped" will become an example in the future…
HS said,
June 12, 2025 @ 6:40 pm
A quick google search reveals, unsurprisingly, that "Donald Trumped" already exists.
Tom Duff. said,
June 12, 2025 @ 7:16 pm
Bowdlerize?
At Pixar my name is (or used to be) a verb or at least a participle. One of our bits of hardware had a Duffing RAM.
AntC said,
June 12, 2025 @ 7:20 pm
The name most often verbed in English is probably MacGyver, …
I beg to disagree. MacGyver is unheard of in Brit English, never mind getting verbed.
Heath Robinson is perhaps the closest comparison in Blighty. Does that get verbed? (Wiktionary informs it at least gets adjectivised.) Perhaps our correspondents there could comment? (And could the last one out leave some of his and Rowland Emett's contraptions running, whilst switching the lights off.)
DaveK said,
June 12, 2025 @ 8:06 pm
The rule in English seems to be that if a verbed name is a direct allusion to the person in question, it’s capitalized (like “to McGyver”) but when it’s become so common that the reference is obscure (who knows Capt. Boycott’s first name?) it gets lower cased.
Tom Ace said,
June 12, 2025 @ 8:49 pm
ブッシュする (bushu-suru), coined after Bush 41 urped on Japan's Prime Minister.
Stephen Goranson said,
June 12, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
Borking nominees had less success of late?
J.W. Brewer said,
June 12, 2025 @ 9:51 pm
I think English verbs derived from toponyms that are (as "proper nouns") conventionally capitalized are likewise conventionally capitalized. "To Americanize" would be a long-standing example. Here's a more recent one: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Californicate
Although lower-case vulcanize from capitalized-divinity Vulcan is an example pointing the other way and I don't think the god is as obscure as Cap't Boycott.
Stig Johan said,
June 13, 2025 @ 4:59 am
Anyone who's watched the TV show Community would be familiar with "Britta" as a verb. As in, "you've Britta'd it!"
languagehat said,
June 13, 2025 @ 7:54 am
There is, as so often, no general rule. If enough people start using a given term lowercase, that's how it is. I myself always write "to google," and I have no problem with "to abelard." I suspect McGyver is more likely to keep its caps because there are two of them.
cameron said,
June 13, 2025 @ 8:22 am
@AntC – to MacGyver something is a bit different from doing a Heath Robinson. the American equivalent of Heath Robinson is Rube Goldberg. and yeah, it doesn't really get verbed, because it's too much of a mouthful. we might describe something as a "Rube Goldberg solution" or a "Rube Goldberg contraption", and I think over the pond "Heath Robinson" could slot right in as a substitute in either of those phrases. one could say "she Rube Goldberged it" but it would imply something completely different from "she MacGyvered" it.
Brett said,
June 13, 2025 @ 3:30 pm
@DaveK: For that matter, who knows MacGyver's first name?
(Angus)
Tom said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:38 am
I think "out-Herods Herod" doesn't count because the verb can't be used in other sentences.
When I tried to think of examples, Stalin popped into my head, but I can't think of any sentences that actually use Stalin as a verb. I'm not sure why I thought of it.
Tom said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:40 am
@DaveK:
Indeed. Nobody knows which Jones was the original craver.
David Marjanović said,
June 14, 2025 @ 6:43 am
Not that it matters, but all of these examples are in Headline Capitalization – something else German lacks, as it happens.
Philip Anderson said,
June 14, 2025 @ 7:59 am
Historically, such verbs were not capitalised:
boycott, bowdlerise, mesmerise, macadamise, hoover.
While Americanise is capitaliised, to french is not (the etymology of to welsh is disputed).
J.W. Brewer said,
June 14, 2025 @ 11:33 am
@Tom: Stalin matches up with the present participle of another verb, thus the WW2-era agitprop song "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_Wasn%27t_Stallin%27#
Philip Taylor said,
June 14, 2025 @ 1:17 pm
Now I know from past correspondence that Philip Anderson is a fellow Briton, but I have to say, I have never previously encountered either the idiom "to French" or the idiom "to Welsh". Having asked Google for their meanings, I now realise that I know the former as "to take French leave" and the latter as "to welch".
CuConnacht said,
June 15, 2025 @ 3:32 am
Another eponymous verb occurred to me in the middle of the night: in my distant youth, to bogart a joint was to take too many drags before passing it along, from Humphrey Bogart so often having a cigarette dangling from his lip. "Don't Bogart That Joint, My Friend," is a 1969 song by Little Feat.
CuConnacht said,
June 15, 2025 @ 3:34 am
Correction: by Fraternity of Man, covered later by Little Feat.
/df said,
June 16, 2025 @ 8:55 am
"Verb me no verbs", as neither Scott, nor Shakespeare, nor even Sheldon Harnick said.
/df said,
June 16, 2025 @ 9:40 am
Also, @Philip Taylor, a man of the world as I imagined, and Google have been more sheltered than one would expect if they understand the verb "french" to mean going AWOL; but they are not alone: Webster believes it's one or another culinary procedure. For everyone else, at a minimum it's kissing with tongues (as Joni told us they do in France's Main Streets). See also "french letter", "le vice anglais", "how much for french?", etc?
As for "welch" it's an alternative spelling to spare Welsh feelings.
And, never confuse the Fraternity of Man with the Brotherhood of Man!
Keith said,
June 17, 2025 @ 3:56 am
"To french" is a cooking term, or rather it is two related terms, both to do with cutting.
It can be applied to vegetables that are odd sizes or shapes, meaning to cut them into uniform pieces to ensure that they cook at the same rate. In this sense it is close to the verb "to julienne", which means to cut into long thin strips.
It can also apply to meat, where it means to cut some of the meat away from the bone to give it a neater appearance.
So there we have the name of the country France and the girl's forename Julienne, both of them transformed into verbs and losing the initial capital letter.
Philip Taylor said,
June 17, 2025 @ 4:21 am
Well, I certainly know of the expression "French kissing", and have understood the meaning thereof for most of my life (tho' I don't recall ever practicing it), but I would never have guessed that "to French" is its modern foreshortening. Thank you for for adding to my vocabulary, /df. And of course also to Keith, although I will have to consult our French head chef before adopting your explanation thereof.
Philip Taylor said,
June 17, 2025 @ 1:12 pm
Our French head chef said that he had never heard of the expression, while not denying that it might exist. He was also unfamiliar with the expression "to Julienne", while being very familiar with the Julienne style of vegetable preparation/presentation.
Terry K. said,
June 18, 2025 @ 9:43 am
@Yuval
If it was titlecase, it should be Macgyver, not MacGyver. Not reason to capitalize the g if it's a title case of what would otherwise be written macgyver. Also, you can click the links and see the usage in the actual articles.
Philip Taylor said,
June 18, 2025 @ 5:29 pm
Well, if we assume that book titles use title case, then there are most definitely counter-examples to your claim, Terry. See, for example, https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&ref_=search_f_hp&sortbyp=17&sts=t&tn=MacGyver
Keith said,
June 19, 2025 @ 3:05 am
@Philip Taylor
The subject of the post is proper nouns that have been turned into verbs *in English*. The equivalent of "frenched cutlet" would in French be "côtelette à manche"; the past participle of the verb "to french" is used as an adjective in English, but in the French term there is neither adjective nor verb… we get what could be translated "cutlet with a sleeve".
And "to julienne [carrots]" in French would be "tailler une julienne [de carrottes]", so using the verb "to cut, to slice".
Verbing nouns in the way presented in the post seems to be more common in English than in any of the (relatively few) languages with which I have sufficient familiarity to pass comment.
"Verbing weirds language", as Calvin said to Hobbes.
Philip Taylor said,
June 19, 2025 @ 5:23 am
Yes, I fully appreciated that, Terry, but as our French head chef has been working in this country for around a quarter of a century, I would have expected him to be familiar with phrases such as "to french" or "to julienne" if they were commonly used in British (hotel) kitchens … As he was unfamiliar with both, I inferred that the phrases are not in common use over here.
Martin Dorey said,
July 3, 2025 @ 2:24 am
Not much point posting when Philip Taylor already won the thread but, as we’re in the presence of so far unrecognized greatness, I feel obliged to note that Duff’s device is always capitalized when my candidates pass their interview. I’d be intrigued to know more about this here Duffing RAM. Eeh, that sounds reet up my street, that.
Did AntC set sail for shores antipodean before heyday of Richard Dean Anderson’s mullet? I read the results of my search of verbings in the Grauniad as supporting my prejudice that it’s uncommon but would be understood.