Anthimeria

In rhetoric, anthimeria, traditionally and more properly called antimeria (from the Greek: ἀντί, antí, "against, opposite" and μέρος, méros, "part"), involves using one part of speech as another part of speech, such as using a noun as if it were a verb: "The little old lady turtled along the road." Using a noun as a verb has become so common that many nouns have actually become verbs also. For example, "Let's book the flight." The noun "book" is now often used as a verb, as in this example. Other noun-as-verb usages include "I can keyboard that for you," "We need to scissor expenses," and "Desk him." Other substitutions could include an adjective used as a noun, as in "She dove into the foaming wet," interjection as verb, as in "Don't aha me!" a verb as a noun, as in "Help! I need some eat!" and so on.

There are a number of examples throughout the English language that demonstrate the evolution of specific words from one lexical category to another. For example, the word 'chill' originated as a noun that could be substituted as a synonym for 'cold'. Throughout the years, 'chill' grew to transition into a verb ('to chill vegetables') and then, subsequently, an adjective ('a chilly morning'). Most recently, 'chill' has yet again transformed into another part of speech, an "intransitive verb, meaning roughly 'to relax'," as author Ben Yagoda explains. Yagoda then quotes what he determines to be the starting point of this lexical shift through referencing the lyrics of The Sugarhill Gang's 1979 hit 'Rapper's Delight': "There's... a time to break and a time to chill/ To act civilized or act real ill".

A more unusual case of anthimeria is displayed not through a change in lexical category but a change in form altogether. The punctuation mark '/' was originally implemented to juxtapose two similarly related words or phrases, such as a 'friend/roommate', meaning that the referred person is both a friend and roommate to the speaker. However, younger generations have come to morph the symbol '/' into the written and spoken word of 'slash'. Anne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, notes that the "emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language".

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