Michael Quinion’s excellent site contains many nuggets, amongst which I recently found his archived answer to the question “where does the expression point blank come from?”

“The blank here is the French word blanc, for the colour white. Archery and artillery targets conventionally had a white spot at the centre at which arrows and shot were aimed. So to point blank was to aim directly at the white. The phrase is known from the end of the sixteenth century, and the figurative sense had developed by the 1650s.
It came to refer particularly to missiles fired close enough to the target that they travelled straight to it, horizontally, with no time for the shot to seem to drop under gravity. You had to be close to the target for this to be true, so it came to mean firing at close range where it was difficult to miss.
Some have suggested that the whole phrase comes from the French point blanc, meaning a white mark, but the OED says firmly that the expression originated in English, and that blank as an English version of the French was in use some time before point-blank appeared. So it seems likely that point here is actually the verb, not the noun.

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996-. All rights reserved. "

My question arises from this, and the chat in another thread about ‘verbifying’.
Are there other usages where a word seems to have been confused between noun and verb in this way?



PS: Personally, I still believe the phrase is far more likely to have crossed over the channel with the Norman archers, who might well have been trained to “tirer le point blanc”. Targets long predated the 16th century for sure; and the noun/verb position in the sentence screams it comes from French. Can someone with good OED access enlighten on the ‘firm’ nature of their research?