http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
Through the ages, language mavens have deplored the way English speakers convert nouns into verbs. The following verbs have all been denounced in this century:
to caveat to input to host to nuance to access to chair to dialogue to showcase to progress
to parent to intrigue to contact to impact
As you can see, they range from varying degrees of awkwardness to the completely unexceptionable. In fact, easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.
I have estimated that about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns. Considering just the human body, you can [head a committee, scalp the missionary, eye a babe, stomach someone's complaints], and so on -- virtually every body part can be verbed (including several that cannot be printed in a family journal of opinion).
What's the problem? The concern seems to be that fuzzy-minded speakers are slowly eroding the distinction between nouns and verbs. But once again, the person in the street is not getting any respect. A simple quirk of everyday usage shows why the accusation is untrue.
Take the baseball term [to fly out], a verb that comes from the noun [a pop fly]. The past tense is [flied], not [flew]; no mere mortal has ever [flown out] to center field. Similarly, in using the verb-from-noun [to ring the city] (form a ring around), people say [ringed], not [rang], and for [to grandstand] (play to the grandstand), they say [grandstanded] not [grandstood].
Speakers' preference for the regular form with [-ed] shows that they are tacitly sensitive to the fact that the verbs came from nouns. They avoid irregular forms like [flew out] because they intuitively sense that the baseball verb [to fly] is different from the ordinary verb [to fly] (what birds do): the first is a verb based on a noun root, the second, a verb with a verb root.
Only the verb root is allowed to have the irregular past-tense form [flew], because only for verb roots does it make sense to have [any] past-tense form. The quirk shows that when people use a noun as a verb, they are making their mental dictionaries more sophisticated, not less so -- it's not that words are losing their identities as verbs versus nouns; rather, there are verbs, there are nouns, and there are verbs based on nouns, and people store each one with a different mental tag.
The most remarkable aspect of the special status of verbs-from-nouns is that everyone feels it. I have tried out examples on hundreds of people -- college students, volunteers without a college education, and children as young as four. They all behave like good intuitive grammarians: they inflect verbs that come from nouns differently from plain old verbs.
