{"id":1035,"date":"2010-07-06T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-06T19:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2010\/07\/06\/learning-a-new-language"},"modified":"2010-07-06T19:53:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-06T19:53:00","slug":"learning-a-new-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=1035","title":{"rendered":"Learning a new language"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>Technology is introducing us to a new language.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, it&#8217;s turning nouns into verbs.<\/p>\n<p>Two such terms stand out.<\/p>\n<p>The first one is &#8220;text.&#8221; It used to mean a body of type. Text was a noun. Today it&#8217;s become a verb, as in, &#8220;My boyfriend, like, texted me just a minute ago and, like, he was so cute trying to tell me he was doing it while driving his car down the freeway at, like, 80 miles an hour.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>OK, &#8220;texted&#8221; is the past tense of the verb &#8220;text.&#8221; But you get the point, right?<\/p>\n<p>Now comes the newest version of a common word: friend.<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I were having dinner one night this past weekend with a young couple with whom we are <em>friends<\/em>. I informed the young woman that I had just opened a Facebook account. &#8220;Oh, really?&#8221; she said. &#8220;Now I&#8217;ll have to &#8216;friend&#8217; you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Huh?<\/p>\n<p>The term &#8220;friend&#8221; used to mean only someone with whom one is quite close; the person to whom you can tell the truth. You share secrets with that person, who knows more about you than you know about yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s a verb, which describes the act of becoming a friend on a Facebook network.<\/p>\n<p>I was hoping that &#8220;parent&#8221; would be the last noun to become a verb (e.g., &#8220;I am learning how to &#8216;parent&#8217; my kids&#8221;). I never imagined what technology would do to the English language.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;ll be much more to come.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technology is introducing us to a new language. Specifically, it&#8217;s turning nouns into verbs. Two such terms stand out. The first one is &#8220;text.&#8221; It used to mean a body of type. Text was a noun. Today it&#8217;s become a verb, as in, &#8220;My boyfriend, like, texted me just a minute ago and, like, he &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=1035\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Learning a new language<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}