Nounspeak

(One cannot help thinking of Nounspeak as being almost a dialect of English.)

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

The pattern is that people with little to say turn to Nounspeak for pompous packaging, while those with something unsavory to say find friendly camouflage in Nounspeak's abstractions and opacities.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

But Nounspeak, like breakfast cereals, is largely an artificial imposition, perpetrated by that growing multitude in the middle with from one to four years of college.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

At a glance Nounspeak might seem a natural development, like the disappearance of the distinction between who and whom or the evolution of a slang word into polite speech, but it is only natural in the sense that foods such as breakfast cereals are a "natural" development in modern society.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

Nounspeak shares common ground with jargon and bombast and gobbledygook and prolixity and confusion of whatever sort.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

A second technique for subverting English into Nounspeak requires changing strong, aggressive verbs into weak nouns.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

Bravo to Bruce Price for his insightful and witty article on Nounspeak [II, 4].

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol III No 2 1976

And Gertrude Stein was speaking about nouns in meager doses, not the excesses here labeled Nounspeak.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

But Nounspeak does seem to be the most sharply defined of these phenomena and may be the more interesting in exhibiting its own rudimentary "grammar," the devices by which perfectly fine English is "translated" into Nounspeak.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976

To put the phenomenon on the intellectual map, I've dubbed it Nounspeak.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol II No 4 1976