Marie Kondo

Stuff English Does

No, I am not going to Marie Kondo my books. Or KonMari them. Whatever.

I found this irritable line in my English folder with a link to an article on ‘getting your shi*t together’ that gushes: ‘Should you not have KonMari-ed your home, let us underscore that a less cluttered environment is almost always going to make you feel more focused and clear-headed.’

(ICYDK, Marie Kondo is the celebrity guru of decluttering, creator of the KonMari method, who [allegedly] laid down that you should keep no more than 30 books. Before she had time to publicly rectify this as a ‘misconception’, a massive backlash from outraged booklovers, me included, had swept across the Net).

But this post is not about books (although I will be writing about loving books and books I love in the future).

It’s about verbs.

About how English is wondrously creative and versatile in turning all sorts of words into verbs. No need to modify them in any way or add any bits and pieces. You just put them in the verb position in the sentence. And that’s it.

As in: I am not going to Marie Kondo my books.

(I’ll leave for future posts the technical stuff along with the vicious arguments, finger-pointing, name-calling and virtue-signalling about how the ‘verbing of nouns’ is the final degeneration of the language and of civilization itself. And you thought nukes were the problem.)

Anyway, for today, here are some examples of people’s names (proper nouns) used as verbs that leapt out at me whilst obsessively surfing and scrolling. (Sources are linked except where I can’t find them.)

“It is not acceptable to take a sample containing an unknown assortment of genetic material and Frankenstein a genome through computer algorithms and alignment in order to claim that it represents a fictional entity.”

(From Viroliegy Newsletter)

(BTW you can read my post on Frankenstuff here).

“Salvador Allende ruthlessly decided that Chile’s natural resources belong to the people of Chile, rather than goodhearted western corporations. This is the game Nicolas Maduro is playing today in Venezuela, but sadly, the empire has so far been unable to Pinochet him.”

(From Normal Island)

“FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan is fed up with companies making consumers go through unnecessary steps just to cancel subscriptions, explaining, "The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want." The new rule is meant to end those shady practices where businesses rely on “negative option features”—you know, the ones where you sign up once and then have to Houdini your way out later.”

(From The Healthy American)

“Isra-hell [sic] has worked hard in the past years in order to "epstein" all western world leaders and their mainstream medias because it knew that Oct. 7th was inevitable.”

(Comment on a Normal Island post 2024)

“Miley Cyrus references me in her twerking stage act, Eminem raps about me, and Beyoncé’s latest hit gives me a shout-out. Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant “Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,” not “Monica Lewinsky’d.”

(From Monica Lewinksy writing in Vanity Fair)

“Over 100 people in the last 200 years have sold patents that use magnets [to generate perpetual motion electricity], unfortunately they have committed suicide, or have been "Princess Diana-d" because of such inventions.”

(From Awakened Species)

“Today (the IDF) tried to test the men of Lebanon and they are getting Rambo’d”

(Twitter/X post 2024)

Of course, context is everything in this dynamic living process, and readers of the future (if they exist) will need lots of footnotes to make sense of these coinages.

And here’s my favourite: a says-it-all meme featuring a well-known legendary personage.

Have you found any cool examples floating around out there? Why not make your own using your favourite corrupt politician/movie hero/cancelled luminary and share them in the comments.