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; 04/28/08 01:04 PM. Reason: rephrased