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"grow"Two interesting uses of the verb to grow: (1) intransitive of non-vegetable things: "While now we talk as once we talk'd / Of men and minds, the dust of change, / The days that grow to something strange, / In walking as of old we walk'd." Tennyson In Memoriam A H H lxxi.11 ( link); (2) transitive of non-living things "Whan dauid had regned vii. yere in Ebron he grewe [French creut] and amended moche this cyte [Jerusalem]" Caxton Godfrey clxix.250.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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... businessman ... tulip grower ... Both call for setting up optimum conditions, and that's as far as it can go. I'm wondering how to get into this sort of business that runs itself. Also, where can I buy these tulip bulbs that are self-fertilizing, self-watering, self-separating/replanting, and defend themselves from squirrels? Are they next to the self-pruning roses? ;-)
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"grow"
(2) transitive of non-living things "Whan dauid had regned vii. yere in Ebron he grewe [French creut] and amended moche this cyte [Jerusalem]" Caxton Godfrey clxix.250. This was the citation I found in the OED dated 1481 that I mentioned earlier, but they didn't have the other one.
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The tulip business, where a lot of effort is put into also, is threatened lately by the building maffs, who want the tulip raising business to move away so they can take the land behind the dunes for building luxury housing, stealing the last open parts in the already overpopulated West of the country.
Ground that has the only type of soil tulips thrive on.
So you're not going to grow tulips unless you grow your tulip business.
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And, Pookie--I don't care 'bout no grammar, here: it is WRONG to say grow a business! So quit baggin' me! [crossthreading e]  Yes but I still don't understand what the answer is to my earlier question. Do you think the concept is wrong - namely that you CAN'T grow a business, or just that using the word 'grow' to describe what you are doing when you make a business get larger is wrong? And if the latter, what term would you use? 
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Ok, ok. The latter. Somebody can make a business grow, or develop it, or increase it; but not grow it! (zmjezhd, the stamping foot indicates my childishness and irrationalness and stubbornness in insisting that things I don't like aren't so; for ex. that orientate is not a real word. This is usually reserved for things that don't really matter; but do NOT let me hear anybody say Antartica!  )
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insisting that things I don't like aren't so; for ex. that orientate is not a real word. My dictionary says that it is a transitive verb with the same meaning as the verb to orient. But I wasn't quite clear whether you were insisting that it IS a real word or insisting that it ain't no such thing?
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[quote=Jackie insisting that it ain't no such thing? I think that's what she's saying.
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yes, that's what she's saying. and it's been said often in these fora. here's one thread in which her opinion is only alluded to, but I think etaoin summed up the general feeling rather nicely. it's at the bottom.
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Interesting word. Can be used in different ways, some of which sound more "right" than others. I agree that to say "I am orientated towards..." sounds 'clunky' as etaoin puts it. But the past participle "orientated" doesn't sound as bad for some reason, especially with the prefix dis- added. Disorientated sounds better than disoriented to me. But the present participle sounds better (to me) as disorienting. And if you can't have orientate, how would you form the adjective or noun from it? What would you call an Orientation Day for new students at a College or University? An Orience Day? Doesn't have the same ring to it.
Interesting to consider the etymology of the word. I presume it comes from aligning everything with the rising sun.
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So you're not going to grow tulips unless you grow your tulip business.
Quietly continue to weave tulips in between stamping feet and dogmatics (nouned adjective) to say to Faldage that growing tulips in a garden takes effort,labor,care. Right now my orientation is towards enjoying and admiring them as they are about to open their flowers. But after the bloom the bulbs have to be taken out at the right time and stored in a dry dark place till coming autum.
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So you're not going to grow tulips unless you grow your tulip business.
Quietly continue to weave tulips in between stamping feet and dogmatics (nouned adjective) to say to Faldage that growing tulips in a garden takes effort,labor,care. Right now my orientation is towards enjoying and admiring them as they are about to open their flowers. But after the bloom the bulbs have to be taken out at the right time and stored in a dry dark place till coming autum. Yes, growing tulips takes effort, labor, care, but all that effort will be for naught if the tulips don't have the genetic makeup to grow. Try it with plastic tulips sometime. A business, on the other hand, takes effort, labor, care too. And you could do it with something that would never grow on its own. We have entire businesses that are based on selling things that are thrown away immediately upon the customer's opening the packege they came in.
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Disorientated sounds better than disoriented to me. eww.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Do not some people call that 'waste'? Aren't there many businesses that are entirely based on producing potential waste?
Or potential nothingness?
Oops, heading for a sensitive domain?
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This was the citation I found in the OED dated 1481 that I mentioned earlier, but they didn't have the other one.
Yes, I found both citations in my handy OED, first edition, microprint. Sorry, I stepped on your citation. It seems to me if a 15th century translator-printer can tell us that King David grew a whole city, why can't some CEO tell us that she'll be growing a business?
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Do not some people call that 'waste'? Well, my example was actually plastic trash bags, but call them what you will.
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On a related topic: I heard an ad on TV today for a company that says it breeds its own pepper seeds. I don't think I've heard breed used before except for the animal world. Have the rest of you heard it for plants, too?
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it is WRONG to say grow a business!
It is wrong to say it is wrong to say "to grow a business". It's one of the better turns of phrase associated with the business world. The metaphor works for me and Faldo. It doesn't for you. La! Jackie is right this time. It sounds pompous, as typical CEO-speak, like "a new paradigm of leveraging synergies". [There is a less polite term for this sort of speech.] 
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Ok, ok. The latter. Somebody can make a business grow, or develop it, or increase it; but not grow it! (zmjezhd, the stamping foot indicates my childishness and irrationalness and stubbornness in insisting that things I don't like aren't so; for ex. that orientate is not a real word. This is usually reserved for things that don't really matter; but do NOT let me hear anybody say Antartica! ) " Orientate" is NOT a real word. It is a stupidism. [For less polite characterization, note the colour.] 
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Aramis!! 
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Grow as a transitive verb in a business context is usually well understood and is no more likely than any synonym to offend with perceived connotations. It could be used in pompous statements, as could expand or any other synonym. Alone, neither pomposity nor any other quality of the verb's user would make its usage wrong.
Anyone hoping to start or grow a business might benefit from carefully cultivating business and personal relationships, or so the business networking formularizers tell us.
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Anyone hoping to start or grow a business might benefit from carefully cultivating business and personal relationships Hey, that's right! Cultivating certainly fits both uses. But I still don't like the phrase.
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Bingo! I was trying to make a reply . I thought it was the new LEGAL!!!! Vista on my new computer that confronted me with surprises. Woewh! This computer is no larger than a medium large dictionary. Soundless, smooth. Never thought I might ever get lyrical about something technical. But I still don't like the phrase. row grow grow your boat gently down the stream, Merrily , merrily , merrily merrily, Life is but a dream.
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Bingo! I was trying to make a reply . I thought it was the new
LEGAL!!!! Vista on my new computer that confronted me with surprises.
Woewh! This computer is no larger than a medium large dictionary.
Soundless, smooth. Never thought I might ever get lyrical about something technical.
Grow grow grow your boat gently down the stream,
Merrily , merrily , merrily merrily,
Life is but a dream. Give it time. Vista has a habit of sneaking up behind you and biting you on the bum. Or taking you "up the creek without a paddle."
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 tsuwm you obviously have far too little to do!
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Here it is again. No Pook, this is not Vista's doing , this is tsuwm who has grown a post.
I've looked for hidden clues in the large white space,
cause I can't find the obvious in this and maybe
what we see is just what we see.
It reminds me of a legendary cinnamon bun.
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About a decade ago, an engineer at SGI wrote a short program (in C) that generated (from an editable list) buzzword bingo cards. When we had day-long offsites to raise the spirits of the poor IT workers, some of us would print off a bunch of cards and play. There's nothing quite like a huge auditorium full of people listening to some marketing VP drone on about synergistic foo-fa-rah and hearing a "bingo" ring out somewhere in the audience. Ah, those where the halcyon pre-bubble-burst days of huge IPOs and precious little content in mahogany row speeches.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Buzzword Bingo hence IBM buzzword bingo - joe (but not quite that much time) friday
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Ultimately we run into a problem I see once in a while (mercifully) in software design: one of infinite recursion, viz.--if we accept the premises that 1) any noun can be "verbed," and 2) any verb can be similarly "nouned," then each node's successor on the resulting family tree may be re-defined as its complement (noun-to-verb OR verb-to-noun).
While this practice may seem on the surface to be innocent and acceptable to most, consider it at its most potentially insidious: if a verb is "nouned" so be it, and the complement, a noun is "verbed," likewise. So far, we're still in Pangloss's best of all possible worlds.
Now take a verb, having been "nouned," and re-verb it. (And never mind the side trip about "reverberation.")
Or conversely, a noun, having been "verbed," and re-noun it. (And never mind the side trip about the state of being "reknowned").
The possibilities are delightfully absurd, perhaps enough to drive a Zen student through this koan to enlightenment.
As a machine having to process such constructs, or as an engineer having to design such a machine (to parse these and assign discrete meaning to them), the problem emerges: the process can go on infinitely, referring to (or should I say "referencing") itself with no specific end defined.
For stack-based machines, this infinite recursion will ultimately result in a "stack overflow" condition (exhaustion of available memory allocated for the stack). For register-based machines, it will ultimately result in the an "out of memory" condition (subtly different, exhaustion of all available free memory).
This is the reason I usually give for avoiding such delightful absurdities: I don't want to run out of available resources deciphering what this (potentially unknown recursively defined) new term actually means.
DTs
P.S. Apologies for not citing examples: the solution is left as an exercise to the reader--simply read any statement released by any government, military, corporate, "education," or other institutional official--such examples abound.
Last edited by Delirium Tremens; 04/28/2008 1:04 PM. Reason: rephrased
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Now take a verb, having been "nouned," and re-verb it. (And never mind the side trip about "reverberation.")
Or conversely, a noun, having been "verbed," and re-noun it. (And never mind the side trip about the state of being "reknowned").
I'm sure Nuncle Z can come up with some real world examples of this phenomenon.
As a machine having to process such constructs, or as an engineer having to design such a machine (to parse these and assign discrete meaning to them), the problem emerges: the process can go on infinitely, referring to (or should I say "referencing") itself with no specific end defined.
For stack-based machines, this infinite recursion will ultimately result in a "stack overflow" condition (exhaustion of available memory allocated for the stack). For register-based machines, it will ultimately result in the an "out of memory" condition (subtly different, exhausting of all available free memory).
Fortunately the human brain doesn't have the limitations of your typical finite-state machine. Normally, if a nouned verb is re-verbed, the resulting verb will have some significantly different meaning from the original verb, one of the verbs will fall out of use, or they will become local variants. The same would be true for verbed nouns that have been re-nouned. Oh, and the correct terms are 'reverbificatationize' and 'renounificationatingize.'
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It reminds me of a legendary cinnamon bun. Huh? Now who's speaking in code?
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Yeow!!
Perhaps Monty Python summarized my reaction best in "Holy Grail:"
"Run away, run away!!!!!"
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"dead jectival:" another mondegreene (sp?)? Got to love these...
--DTs
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Z can come up with some real world examples of this phenomenon.
Of words that have changed lexical category more than once through zero morphology? Can't off the top of my head, and I agree with you that something would've changed along the trail, e.g., meaning, form.
I think it's not an issue in NLP (natural language processing). I suppose it depends if one thinks that part of speech-ness is some property inherent in a word or whether, as many would think, that it is how a word is used syntactically that determines what it is. The former handles words like love (noun and verb) which not even peevologists find anomalous owing to its antiquity, but the latter would seem a more robust way to develop a word tagger. (It should also be easy enough to rewrite any tail-recursive function as an iterative one, and in writing any function one should take into account infinite recursion or endless loops.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Yeow!!
Perhaps Monty Python summarized my reaction best in "Holy Grail:"
"Run away, run away!!!!!" TIM: Well, that's no ordinary rabbit! ARTHUR: Ohh. TIM: That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on! ROBIN: You tit! I soiled my armour I was so scared! TIM: Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer! Monty Python anything tops my list! I love their turns of phrases, most especially the many ways to say "dead" in the parrot sketch... :0)
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...not even peevologists... Nice coinage, but technically shouldn't they be peevophiles, those who love to peeve (hey there's another good verbing of a noun!) - I mean, you yourself are a peevologist aren't you? That is, in the sense of being someone who is an expert or commentator on peeves and 'peevers' and all things peevish?
Last edited by The Pook; 04/29/2008 3:04 AM.
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peevologists
It's not my coinage, but I think of peevologists are those who collect peeves.
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peevologists
It's not my coinage, but I think of peevologists are those who collect peeves. Their own, or those of others? If the latter, then you're definitely a peevologist!
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Their own, or those of others? A difficult question to answer. Most of the usage shibboleths of the modern grammar nazi (aka prescriptivist, peevologist, grammar maven) are not their own, but come from other equally ill-informed pseudo-grammarians. For example, somebody like Dryden comes along and decides ex cathedra that sentences (which he never really get around to defining) must never end with a preposition. Even the Bishop Lowth found this fiat a bit too much and in his seminal peevological work, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, (whence many other modern-day usage factoids) he penned: The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as, “Horace is an author, whom I am delighted with.” “The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of.” This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style. NB, the sentence starting "this is an Idiom" and ending with to before the semi-colon. Old Bob had a sense of humor that Dryden and his ilk were lacking. But there is hope. Samuel Johnson started out editing his magnificent dictionary as a prescriptivist, but by the end he had pretty much become more of a descriptivist.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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