Some language prescriptivists (I’m usually not one of them) lament that we English speakers — particularly those of us in North America — thinking nothing of turning nouns into verbs, or “verbyifying.”

  • “I’m planning to cab, it into town tonight.”
  • “Oh, my God. Did you see that? She just Britney Spearsed it!” (many possible interpretations here)
  • “He really hammed it up at the party.”

And then this, from Michelle Tampoya in a Skype chat just moments ago, when I had asked whether she’d heard about iVillage’s upcoming “girls’ night out” in Second Life:

“Yup, I already RSS‘d that” … meaning, Michelle had subscribed to iVillage’s SL events blog feed.

RSS has been verbified. Brilliant!

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