"Those Irritating Verbs-As-Nouns" - 0 views
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Frederick Smith on 31 Mar 13"Do you have a solve for this problem?" "Let's all focus on the build." "That's the take-away from today's seminar." Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, "Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?" If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization.... I don't actually care for "Do you have a solve?" Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make about how to express ourselves - and in our assessment of other people's expression - but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic.