I can't give an exact quote (I'm traveling, and away from my notes), but the definition of nouns in Lindley Murray's grammar (one of the primary influences on the American school-grammar tradition) didn't use "thing" at all, but rather something like, "object upon which the intellect can operate" -- a kind of wording that made it clear Murray was including extremely abstract notions. I suspect "thing" was substituted as soon as enough teachers tried to work with Murray's phrase in front of first-graders. Of course, since "thing" can mean "inanimate physical object" or "objects and also abstract notions," and elementary students are not particularly focused on the abstract, it's usually the "physical object" reading that comes into play in classrooms.
I've encountered lesson plans in which the English teacher encourages students to classify nouns into "their three basic categories: people, places, and things." That's a completely artificial activity -- English nouns can easily be classified on the basis of their usage, etc. (count vs. noncount, proper vs. common, etc.) but the "people/place/thing" division is not one the language regularly "encodes" (unlike in some languages, names of places in English don't all get a special suffix, etc.). It's a bit like telling students, "Classify these verbs into their three basic categories: motions, stationary activities, and everything else." I can't think of many better examples of the danger of reifying definitions.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Tue 6/10/2008 10:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Anthimeria: Hell in a handbasket
Brad,
Attitudes aside, your definition of "noun" is limited. For example, 'respect' is a noun, but I think we'd be hard put to call it a person, place, or thing. What you're really defining is a concrete noun, but languages are full of abstact ones, too.
Paul
----- Original Message ----
From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 7:51:56 AM
Subject: Anthimeria: Hell in a handbasket
This item speaks to the essence of my position, that we should teach High Standard English rather than Low Standard English, then let it go to hell in whatever handbasket the writer later demands.
If you want the source, Google "anthimeria".
.brad.10jun08.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Verb My Noun
A noun is a person, place, or thing. A verb is an action word. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun.
Except when they aren't.
English is a slippery, supple tongue, hard to corner and classify. I just learned a term for this state of flux: anthimeria (an-thi-MER-i-a), the use of a word outside of its customary part of speech--most commonly, but not exclusively, the use of a noun as a verb.
Ben Yagoda, subbing for William Safir in the "On Language" column of the Sunday New York Times Magazine,offers a lively introduction to the concept, which he says "gives English an invigorating slap upside the head." ("Upside": how many anthimeric changes can you ring on that word?)
English speakers and writers have been turning nouns into verbs, and vice versa, for centuries, and we are the richer for it. Yagoda points out that Shakespeare was the first to use "season" and "dog" as verbs and "design" and "scuffle" as nouns. More recently, I would count "to eyeball" and "to blacklist" as nervy verb-y recastings of nouns.
In street English, anthimeria runs rampant and even amok, as in "my bad," "dumb down," "weird out," and "pimp my ride," which Yagoda calls doubly anthimeric. ("Ride" came into Old English as a verb, was first recorded as a noun in 1759, and acquired the meaning "a motor vehicle" as early as 1930.) Or consider the noun-adjectives (nounjects?) in "bitch slap" and "that's dope."
Anthimeria isn't always so colorful or evocative. In its more graceless forms,anthimeria is the plague of corporate English, which piles up Latin-derived noun-verbs (nerbs?) in the misguided belief that they sound hifalutin: "Impact the bottom line." "Leverage our core competencies." "Access those files." It's not anthimeria's fault, poor girl; these constructions are culpable on grounds of ugliness, triteness, and aridity. Unlike "eyeball" and "blacklist," which have very old English origins and concrete meanings, "impact," "leverage," et al., suck the air out of every sentence they inhabit.
And don't even get me started on "incent," to mean "provide an incentive." Incensed, I am.
Meanwhile, corporate lawyers rack up billable hours primly telling malefactors to stop saying "Please xerox that document" or "I googled that hottie." Go figure: Companies spend millions turning their brands into household words--words that take on vigorous independent lives, stretch their muscles, and through the magic of anthimeria become active parts of speech--and then spend millions more to keep us from using the words in our households. C'mon, guys: chill.
Comments
I would add to this that some examples of what you call 'anthimeria' are more easily described in terms of the utter ignorance of the user.
For example, in respect of the odious 'leverage' (as verb), The Oxford English dictionary defines the suffix '-age' as forming a singular noun from the verb to which it is attached. To talk about 'leveraging business advantage' as our corporate friends do, is therefore as illiterate as saying "you are wastaging my time"!
One does not necessarily expect the majority of users of the English language to be able to provide a precise definition of each and every common suffix. Nevertheless, one does expect that their experience in using the languages would have given them at least some intuitive sense of the meaning of its most common elements.
Surely therefore, one would have hoped that the originator of 'leverage' as verb (as I guess there must have been someone who used it first) might have had at least some sense that there was something not quite right about what he was saying.
(I say 'he' because its the sort of mistake that a male is more likely to make than a female - and I'm male myself).
Though perhaps even more worrying is the way that deference can reduce the critical faculties of those who do have a more intuitive sense of their own language. Imagine the bright young graduate who hears the vice-president talking about "leveraging business advantage wherever possible" and concludes that if the VP says it, it MUST be correct!
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