Webgrrling with Erin

Erin invited me to attend a meeting of the Big-D Web Grrls this evening. Their mission statment describes them as “a community of women who share your interests”. Wow! A room full cute girls who like computers. What could be more fun than that for a male computer geek? Don’t worry, I behaved myself! (but if I ever go to a LinuxChix meeting, who knows…)

I was amused by the nomenclature – there were two Greeter grrls, a snack grrl, and a something-else grrl. The leader-of-the-group grrl spoke in lots of Dilbertese and did a thing that I absolutely cannot stand: the verbing of nouns. Instead of “having a dialog with someone”, she said she was “dialoging” them. I get really tired of people “officing” and “ideating” but at least those non-words show efficiency in that they reduce the number of words required to make a complete sentence. What I really can’t stand are verbed nouns used when an existing verb would work fine. Like “calendaring” – why not just say “scheduling”? The people who spread this bizzare word usage need to spend more time golf coursing and less grammaring. (and,yes, I know “verbing” isn’t a word but if other people can make up and use bad English, so can I – besides, the phrase “verbing nouns” follows the fine Unix tradition of self-referential names!)

But I digress… I really spent far less time thinking about grammar than it would seem from reading this. Oh well, I’ll report more next time Erin takes me webgrrling.