GENERATION WHY?: Bee tee dubs, you got verbed

There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin tells his tiger he likes "to verb words" - meaning he likes turning nouns into verbs. "Remember when 'access' was a thing?" he asks. "Now, it's something you do. It got verbed."

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GENERATION WHY?: Bee tee dubs, you got verbed

POSTED: Friday, June 10, 2011, 4:00 PM

Matt Cantor puts our generation on blast.

There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin tells his tiger he likes “to verb words” — meaning he likes turning nouns into verbs. “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing?” he asks. “Now, it’s something you do. It got verbed.”

Lately, it seems like the Internet is verbing everything. It was a big deal when people started saying they would “Google” something. Somehow, that manner of speaking has begun to apply to every major website. You don’t look at someone’s Facebook page; you Facebook them. You don’t search for videos on YouTube; you YouTube them. You can also IMDB actors or movies, and ideas can be Wikipedia’d (how would you even spell that?).

I’ve always found emoticons annoyingly trite. “I broke my leg :( ,” “I got a new puppy :),” “We needlessly and illegally invaded Iraq :( .” But what’s even weirder is the fact that people are now actually speaking emoticons. You’ve probably heard it: “I have a rare disease. Sad face!” Meanwhile, we’re orally spelling out Internet shorthand, as in “Oh, bee tee double-you, I have to work tomorrow, slash I need to buy some food, but we can hang out later.”

This all brings in a whole new generation of communication. I’m pretty sure my grandparents wouldn’t understand it if I was all like, “Bee tee dubs, Grandpa, you know how you were talking about the lives lost in Dub Dub 2? Total sad face. Anyway, I didn’t know who Dwight Eisenhower was, so I tried IMDBing him, but he wasn’t in any movies, so I just Wikipedia’d his name and found out he was a general-slash-president. Oh and PS, you need to YouTube this hilarious video of a talking dog.”

Yeah, my grandparents wouldn’t get that. But hey, there’s no real need to talk to my grandparents about this high-tech stuff anyway. They’re so old they still use MySpace. JK.

Posted by Matt Cantor @ 4:00 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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