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Tony Blair is hardly Britain’s favourite man. At home, his government and party have recently been — yet again — up to their knees in sleaze. Abroad, he is seen as too close by half to George Bush: lapdog, poodle, toady, bagman, lackey and flunkey are just some of the epithets aimed at him in this context, plus several more best omitted from a family newspaper.
Yet credit where credit is due. Albeit as its victim, not its originator, Blair has given the English language a new verb: to poodle. More exactly, a new meaning: the verb exists, but in other senses, ones that I’ve never met in use. My dictionary tells me it has in the past meant to clip a dog to look like a poodle; and my London-born wife tells me of a moribund colloquial usage, poodle along, meaning go gently. But now it has an apt, up-to-the-minute meaning.
Mr Blair, sneered the leader of Britain’s opposition Tories recently, was “too busy poodling to Bush” to attend to some other business. Another Tory promptly employed the term as a plain intransitive verb, with no to and indirect object: in accepting Britain’s new, notoriously unequal, extradition treaty with the United States of America, he said simply, “we poodled.”
By nice coincidence, one may think, this kind of shift from noun to verb is typically American. So, at least, lament those who dislike it. They are right, but only half-right: in fact, the shift is common also in British English, indeed in most people’s English. As with other things — cars, electoral spending and bombs come to mind — Americans have just carried the habit further, faster than the rest of us.
Muses smile on us
Thus it was they who first chose to action some plan, or trial some drug; usages today widely adopted in Britain. These two still grate on your wordcager’s elderly ears. Yet, after long hesitation, he is by now perfectly happy to access files in his computer; just as, 40 years ago, he used to phone, cable or telex a story to his newspaper, later to fax it, and now to e-mail it. Every one of those verbs began life as a noun.
So did countless others; back in Blair territory, to toady, flunkey, kowtow and to parrot among them. Read any page of prose with this thought in mind, and you’ll find umpteen such verbs, many so familiar that you never noticed until you made the experiment — both notice and (as a verb) experiment being examples. To blame all this on American idiom is as sensible as crediting the Mississippi with filling the Atlantic Ocean.
It is sometimes hard to know which came first, noun or verb: usually, the noun, I’d guess, to judge from the number of very common nouns partnered by much rarer verbs. For instance: head, scalp, eye, nose, mouth, jaw, neck (a Twenties to Fifties version of today’s smooch), back, shoulder, elbow, hand, palm (off), finger, thumb, stomach, leg, knee, foot, heel and toe. Or, if you prefer, house, roof, floor, wall (up or in), nail, screw, hammer and saw. And much else.
How fortunate our language is that can do such things, with complete freedom and no need to alter even one letter of the spelling (though there is a curious shift of stress with some latinate dissyllables such as convert or reject). No other tongue known to me has this freedom; certainly none in Europe. The Muses smile on us. Are we to frown and sneer?