"Zombie nouns" stalk weak prose, terrifying readers trying to make sense of it
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
VERBING nouns annoys a lot of people. Traditional complaints include those against "to impact", "to chair" and "to author". And newly verbed nouns are continually entering the language: from "to login", to "to Facebook", and "to friend". But we forget how many old nouned verbs are now totally unobjectionable. Shakespeare was a master noun verber (coining "to dog" among others). Fifty years ago, "to host" was derided as glib journalese, though it is centuries old. The Economist’s own style guide generally discourages vogue verbing.
Is there anything worse than fashionable verbed nouns? As it happens, there is: nouned verbs and nouned adjectives. Or rather, over-reliance on abstract, fancy-looking but vague nouns formed with suffixes like –ation, -isation, -ment, -ship, -ance and so forth. They fill the worst kind of academic and bureaucratic prose, the kind a reader finishes and wonders why all those words just don’t seem to mean anything.
“Nominalisation”, the name for this phenomenon, is criticised by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psycholinguist, in his new book "The Sense of Style" (reviewed here). Nominalisations are common in scientific papers. Do mice avoid each other in an experiment? No, they exhibit social avoidance. Do certain people drink too much? No, they present overconsumption. Mr Pinker, in turn, cites Helen Sword of the University of Auckland, who has memorably given nominalisations a less nominalised name. She calls them “zombie nouns”, for their habit of ambling about in packs, eating the brains of readers.
Zombie nouns are not limited to English. German is particularly notorious for them. Take this notice in a parking garage (nouns in bold):
Mit dem Einfahren in die Tiefgarage erkennt der jeweilige Nutzer diese Nutzungsordnung an. Weder Bewachung noch Verwahrung sind Gegenstand des Mietvertrages dieser Nutzung.
Upon entry into the garage each respective user acknowledges these terms of use. Neither security services nor maintenance are an element of the usage contract.
In plain English, one might say: “All those entering the garage are bound by these terms. The landlord provides neither security nor maintenance.” This could also be rendered into plain German. But amazingly, Johnson’s own German usage manual recommends zombie noun phrases (“upon entry into the garage”) over relative clauses like “those who enter the garage”, saying that this represents more authentic formal German. Alas, this is true—but it is also a reason official German is a headache to read. (Some Germans know this, there is even a prize for vivid academic German writing, which this week was awarded to Martin Muslow, a historian. You can see a sample of his German style here.)
Returning to English, it can be hard to observe a lot of the usage advice out there, especially if that advice is phrased in a list of “don’ts” regarding grammatical categories. We hear "don’t verb nouns", I have written "don’t noun verbs", and elsewhere one can find "write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs". Trying to observe all these commands at once might leave the writer stuck with nothing but a string of prepositions.
The best advice is more “do” than “don’t”. Be clear and concrete about who did what to whom. This means writing short sentences with a named actor and an acted-upon. Nouns denoting the old fashioned “people, places and things”, especially physical things you can stub your toe on, are better than “metaconcept” nouns like event, phenomenon, level and observation. Concrete nouns almost force the writer to use vivid verbs: an observation might explain something, or a phenomenon might indicate something else. But a truck or a hyena or a policeman are likely to do something more interesting, like speeding or howling or arresting someone. People like stories they can see in their mind’s eye. As Mr Pinker explains from his psychologist’s chair, this is because such stories are easier to understand than all those metaconcepts and zombie nouns. Easy things are pleasing. Unfortunately, making it easy for the reader means more work for the writer—but it is worth it.
