a very "nouny" noun. Paris, which satisfies only the first, is on the fringes.have also done some major fiddling. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum's magisterial 2002 "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" counts pronouns as a subset of nouns, replaces articles with a new category called "determinatives" (which also includes words like this, some and every) and divides conjunctions into "coordinators" (and, but and or) and "subordinators" (like whether). regardless of name, lexical categories are quite useful. They make possible not only Mad Libs but also the rhetorical device anthimeria - using a word as a noncustomary part of speech - which is the reigning figure of speech of the present moment. 'S not to say it's a new thing. In Middle English, the nouns duke and lord started to be used as verbs, and the verbs cut and rule shifted to nouns. Shakespeare was a pro at this; his characters coined verbs - "season your admiration," "dog them at the heels" - and such nouns as design, scuffle and shudder. Less common shifts are noun to adjective (SJ Perelman's "Beauty Part"), adjective to noun (the Wicked Witch's "I'll get you, my pretty") and adverb to verb (to down a drink). "Functional shifting, "as grammarians call it, is a favorite target of language mavens, whose eyebrows rise several inches when nouns like impact and access are verbed. Nor do companies like it when their trade names get shifted. In his book "Word Spy," Paul McFedries writes that Google's attorneys send journalists who use google as a verb a stern letter that cites examples of appropriate ("I used Google to check out that guy I met at the party") and inappropriate ("I googled that hottie") uses. 's beyond obvious that Google's lawyers are fighting a losing battle. And they should relax. Not only is "I googled that hottie" great publicity for the company, but it's fresh and funny and an excellent example of how anthimeria gives English an invigorating slap upside the head. At this very moment, the language is being regenerated with phrases like my bad, verbs like dumb down and weird out and guilt ("Don't guilt me") and even the doubly anthimeric "Pimp My Ride," an MTV series in which a posse of artisans take a run-down jalopy and sleek it up into a studly vehicle containing many square yards of plush velvet and an astonishing number of LCD screens.word chill showed up more than 500 years ago as a noun meaning " ; cold "- as in" winter's chill. "In short order, it turned into a verb referring to the process of making someone or something cold and then into an adjective. (Eventually chilly became more common.) Fast-forward to 1979, when the song "Rapper's Delight" worked a variation on Ecclesiastes, explaining that "There's. . . A time to break and a time to chill/To act civilized or act real ill. "That intransitive verb, meaning roughly" to relax, "was expanded to chill out in 1983, according to Th...
