Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 October 12

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October 12

Colourful verbs

Her face reddened with rage when she heard him blackening her name; the obvious thing to do was to go and have her teeth whitened.

• There's also the little-used verb pinken.
• There is the word golden, but it's not a verb.
• There are no such words as orangen, bluen, greenen, purplen, yellowen, greyen, brownen, silveren, rosen, mauven, violeten, creamen, buffen, khakien, maroonen, vermilionen, ultramarinen, or any others I can think of.
• Green, yellow, silver and some others can be used as verbs in the sense of imparting the colour to something, but they don't require an –en ending.
• As far as I can see, black, white, pink and red are the only colours that form –en verbs. Why only these four? -- (Jack of Oz=) 202.142.129.66 (talk) 04:29, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

well, there's 'darken' and 'lighten' as well. Just a guess, but those are the only active color words. it's a fairly common to blacken things (as in a fire), and we literally get pink with embarrassment, red with rage, white with fear. similar words (green with envy or illness, blue meaning sadness) are metaphorical, not literal, and may not merit an active verb form. --Ludwigs2 06:11, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

That sounds like a plausiible guess. For further research, this kind of verb with the suffix "-en" is called causative. (lengthen, strengthen, tighten, brighten, ...). ---Sluzzelin talk 06:18, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

"A noble spirit embluens the smallest man." I'm afraid it's just the usual lexical gaps of derivational morphology... AnonMoos (talk) 09:27, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Article is Productivity (linguistics)... AnonMoos (talk) 09:30, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

"Green" (not greenen) is sometimes used as a verb (I see it even has a website), and Wicked (musical) has "degreenify". AndrewWTaylor (talk) 10:47, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

The original inquiry included this point, of which another example is "to brown" ("First brown the toast lightly.") There is "to caramelize", but this involves, I think, more than color. Then there are those problematic lines from Shakespeare, a shameless serial neologiser, "this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." (Macbeth, II:2) —— Shakescene (talk) 17:46, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I think part of the answer is simple euphony: blueen and greenen sound wrong to the listener, so a speaker or writer would hesitate to use them. There is "to empurple". (Aren't you glad that English has twice the working vocabulary of most modern languages?) —— Shakescene (talk) 17:51, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, let me pose the question in reverse. Since we brown meat, and pages of a book become yellowed, why don't we simply black things, or white our teeth, or talk about faces redding? Why do these few words need to go the extra mile and add an -en? And as for having twice the vocab of other languages, there is no room for complacency when we consider the multitude of truly shocking gaps we have yet to fill, like ept, sult, peat, protransitive, restroy, hypostruct, and so many others.  :) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 18:57, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Browning isn't specifically about color: i.e., when we whiten something we do it to make it white, when we brown something, we do it to make it cooked. the -en suffix means "denoting the development, creation, or intensification of a state", and there aren't that many colors that we think of as 'developing' rather than simply 'existing' just as a color. Even leaves don't 'develop' a green color; they develop a red color in the fall, but spring out of the bud already green. --Ludwigs2 20:36, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

People of my mature years are sometimes described as having greyed a little up top. (Or a lot, as the case may be.) Gun metal is sometimes blued. HiLo48 (talk) 06:32, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't think productivity or non-linguistic things (such as Ludwigs' proposal) are the answer here, if you look cross-linguistically. French, for instance, has verdir and bleuir (green-en and blue-en), as well as all the ones that English does (rougir, blanchir, rosir, noircir), but I doubt that French people make stuff green or blue more often than we do, or that 'greening' and 'blueing' (I just blue myself...) mean something different for them than they do for me. Rather, I bet this is just another language-to-language idiosyncracy (as AnonMoos suggests above: "just the usual lexical gaps of derivational morphology"). Some languages that are more agglutinating and have more productive causative suffixes, such as Turkish, probably can -en-ify all the colors. rʨanaɢ (talk) 13:27, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

For productivity, Esperanto has no limits within its own patterns of word formation. (See Esperanto vocabulary#Word formation.) For example, it has blanka ("white", adjective), blanketa ("slightly white, whitish"), blankega ("very white"), blanko ("white", noun), blankeco ("whiteness"), blankigi ("to whiten", transitive), blankiĝi ("to become white", intransitive), blui blanki ("to be white"), blankulo ("white person"). Similar words can be formed for all colors. (See eo:Koloro.)

—Wavelength (talk) 18:24, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Did you mean 'blanki' ("to be white"), Wavelength? 'Blui' seems out of place there. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:10, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I did, and I am correcting it. Thank you.—Wavelength (talk) 02:39, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

"Verbing weirds language." — Calvin. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:42, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

"Origin of 'going to the John' " question from the Reference Desk/Humanities

From Origin of "Going to the John"

John Harington has been credited as having invented the flush toilet in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Could this fact be the origin of the slang phrase Going to the john? Back in medieval times the word for latrines was the jakes, hence Harington naming his toilet Ajax. --Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 15:13, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

etymonline.com says: John, "toilet," 1932, probably from jack, jakes, used for "toilet" since 16c. (see Jack). 24.16.154.46 (talk) 15:24, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

The folk etymology of the "john" being named for a guy named John who invented an Elizabethan flush toilet is as amusing as the "crapper" being named for Thomas Crapper who was a Victorian plumber and fixture manufacturer. Edison (talk) 19:29, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Or of Otto Titzling having invented the brassiere. --Jayron32 19:32, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Out-Google Google?

What is to out-Google Google?

Does it simply mean to surpass Google?--Analphil (talk) 17:26, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, pretty much, or "to be more like Google than Google itself" (though you'd have to give more context to be sure). It originates from the phrase "out-Herod Herod", from Hamlet, Act3 Scene 2. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:56, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I suggest a more precise definition is to surpass Google at what Google is best-known for doing. --Anonymous, 05:41 UTC, October 13, 2010.

Or to be more infamous than the idea of Google i.e. international corporation with the impression it is free and progressive/new-age. schyler (talk) 01:50, 14 October 2010 (UTC)