“What verb,” asks Helen Sword in the latest “Draft” column in The New York Times, “describes the act of creating a new verb from another part of speech? Verbify, of course—or, simply, verb.” She’s right—to an extent. She goes on to give examples that add the usual suffixes to nouns and adjectives to create verbs—prettify from pretty, Mondayize from Monday, Californicate from … well, let’s not go there. She then proceeds to produce the more academic terms zero derivation, functional shifting, and my favorite, anthimeria, to describe the morphing of a noun into a verb.
My sense, though, is that (at least) two different shiftings are taking place. The sort that Sword refers to, wherein a prefix or suffix supplies the shift, receives little notice except when a double shift has taken place, as in solution, being the noun form of solve, morphs into the ugly solution…