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Christopher Shade wrote: <<How do you feel about the use of the w
ord 'authored'?>>
Ah! The dread "nominalisation of verbs" issue (if I got that jargon
right). In principle, there's nothing wrong with turning nouns into
verbs... take, for example, love/ to love, effect/to effect, and
psychoanalysis/to psychoanalyze. (And I wish you luck if you're trying
to find some deep Freudian meaning to those three choices! They just
bubbled to the surface first.)
The problem arises when people create neologisms that don't improve
on the traditional usage and that sound awkward to boot. "To author"
falls into this category. Unless there's a clear distinction you
intend to make between "to author" and "to write", "to create", "to
collaborate on", "to design", and many others, why create a new word
that sounds awkward and doesn't add any new meaning? Kill the sucker!
(The verb, not you!)
