Can You VERB It?

When my alarm woke up me up this morning and I promptly hit the “snooze,” I wound up not getting an extra bit of sleep. Instead, for whatever reason, I found myself thinking about verbs. Yes, verbs. Yeah, okay, this is how I amuse myself... *sigh*

Well, more specifically, verbs and nouns. Maybe even Verbs vs. Nouns. What I’m getting at: Suddenly (or more likely again) I’m intrigued by how some words can be both a Noun and a Verb. Oh sure, I’ve noticed before. But there on the pillow for want of a moment’s more rest it became quite curious. Some words are just... both.

Kiss, plant, rope - to name merely but three of them. And then with some words it doesn’t work so well at all: imagine, crumb, leaf. (Now why did THAT assortment come to my head?)



It brought to mind a line from Frasier in which a woman tells him, Ah, see, I’m not one of those for whom ‘antique’ is a verb. I remember laughing quite a bit at that with Sunshine.

And in this day and age, we create new nouns-to-verbs like: Google & text

I don't remember where specifically (and suspect it's been much more than once) I remember someone asking, "Did you just make '____' a VERB?"

I bet I’m going to be noticing it more and more now... but I’ll be more interested in the words that “can’t” be interchangeable!