Grammar Watch

Call me anal (again) but I can't help but wince every time I hear a new noun-as-verb.

It seems to me that because no-one knows what's grammatically right and wrong anymore, as soon as anyone can't be bothered to structure a sentence properly so uses a noun as a verb, everyone else thinks it's suddenly ok to do the same. The standards are being set by the lowest common denominator.

And that lowest common denominator might just be the world of sports journalism.

Of course, medalling was inevitable (although with so many people medalling in everything, one wonders how anything gets done!). But I was watching the olympics the other day and was shocked to learn (from a BBC commentator no less) that the 100m freestyle was "dead-heated".

Apart from raising the prospect of crematoriums being used to heat blocks of flats, this noun-as-verb seemed particularly willful. It wasn't as if the commentator has stumbled into it by starting a sentence that needed to end in a verb, e.g. "the British swimmer lunged for the wall to dead-heat the race with the American". No, she simply said "the race was dead-heated"- it would have been just as easy to say "the race was a dead heat". But no, she obviously thought 'I know what will make this sentence more dynamic and exciting, if I turn dead heat into a verb! Nouns are overrated anyway!'

Perhaps next she'll persuade JK to rewrite one of Jamiroquai's biggest hits-

"My heels are canned-heated tonight baby!..."