Response to Adjectivy

In his Evolving English II blog, Mike wrote a post titled Adjectivy—a clever name for the contents of the post and also defined as—

When people note (or complain about) words changing parts of speech, they tend to draw examples of nouns becoming verbs (verbizing) and verbs becoming nouns (nounification, double bonus).

Basically he talked about people having issues with adding endings such as –y onto the end of words, which obviously creates a new tense of a word in a non-dictionary approved manner.

Personally, I fail to see the harm in doing so in casual conversation. Obviously this is not appropriate for formal papers or presentations. Spoken language is ever evolving and does get incorporated into written language often enough. (Though “blog” is still not a recognized work in the Microsoft Word dictionary)

The Adjectivy post excited me because I catch myself doing this constantly, especially in chit chat and instant messaging to get my point across when my brain fails to produce an appropriate word. However, my ending of choice usually end in –yness or –ness, not just –y. It’s semi-comical at times and everyone usually knows what I am trying to convey, so what’s the problem? Problem is, intelligent speaking scholars do not want to be belittled by common folk who have a brain fart or two. The problem with that is the hoity-toity scholars who do not feel someone they deem as common folk might actually be on or above their intelligence level, which is a grave brain fart on their part.

It was an interesting post though because it is something I have been noticing while talking, observing, or eavesdropping. Still, I feel no need to alter my current habits since I am harming no one and may even be contributing to the next language revolution in a minute sense of the drawn out the cultural/language change we are ever-experiencing.