VERBING nouns annoys a lot of people. Traditional complaints include those against “to impact”, “to chair” and “to author”. And newly verbed nouns are continually entering the language: from “to login”, to “to Facebook”, and “to friend”. But we forget how many old nouned verbs are now totally unobjectionable. Shakespeare was a master noun verber (coining “to dog” among others). Fifty years ago, “to host” was derided as glib journalese, though it is centuries old. The Economist’s own style guide generally discourages vogue verbing.

Is there anything worse than fashionable verbed nouns? As it happens, there is: nouned verbs and nouned adjectives. Or rather, over-reliance on abstract, fancy-looking but vague nouns formed from with suffixes like –ation, -isation, -ment, -ship, -ance and so forth. They fill the worst kind of academic and bureaucratic prose, the kind a reader finishes and wonders why all those words just don’t seem to mean anything.

“Nominalisation”, the name for this phenomenon, is criticised by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psycholinguist, in his new book “The Sense of Style” (reviewed Continue reading