What’s in a word?

My husband, John, and I were enjoying a home-cooked meal. We eat out quite a bit, so it’s always a treat when we get to slow down and make a meal at home.
We usually prepare it together, and after years of practice, I can finally say we make a pretty good team. Each of us has tasks we prefer to do and those we shy away from. He’s in charge of anything that gets grilled outside. I oversee activities on the stove. I get all the ingredients out of the refrigerator and pantry. He sets the table. He unloads the dishwasher, and I put the dirty dishes and utensils in it. He also chops most of the vegetables.
Which brings me to my story.
John and I were sitting at the dining room table eating caprese salads, eggplant parmesan and crusty Italian bread when he made an announcement: “I tambourined some cucumbers today.” John likes his pickled cucumbers. It’s a summer tradition for us. He makes a mix of vinegar, sugar and water, and we add cucumbers and eat from it all summer. “I tambourined some cucumbers.”
Normally, I’d get fixated on the fact he had transformed a noun into a verb. It seems to happen so frequently these days. For instance, when did we transition from creating a PDF out of a file to PDFing the file? When did we stop posting an extremely large file to an FTP site and begin FTPing it? We used to write on blogs; now we just blog. We used to search on Google; now we just google it. The wordsmith in me lets me notice these evolutions in our language, at least until they are so common I forget from what form the original word or abbreviation emerged. But on this occasion, that wasn’t what caught my attention.
“I tambourined some cucumbers,” he so proudly proclaimed. Unfortunately, my reaction was to burst out laughing. I knew what he was trying to say; he just was saying it all wrong.
Several months ago I bought him a gift because, as I said, he is the one in charge of slicing the vegetables in our home. Well, really I bought him the gift because I did not want to be the one in charge of slicing the vegetables in our home. I bought him a slicer. It’s pretty snazzy. It can slice thick or thin or julienne. And it has a very special name, a mandolin. I’m not exactly sure when a mandolin stopped being the musical instrument my grandfather played and became a machine to slice tomatoes and zucchini, but John was pretty excited to get his new toy. Except, he can’t seem to remember its name.
For a few months, I heard proclamations of his successful “banjoing” of the veggies. The visual image of cutting carrots and peppers with a banjo always made me giggle. With this introduction of yet another instrument to his veggie-slicing medley, I pictured a more violent (and noisy) assault on our food. John has always been the type who felt you should understand his meaning by the context of the conversation more than from the specific words he chooses.
Picking the right word has always been important to me, and it is increasingly crucial in marketing circles as well. Years ago, the perfect grouping of words might have generated an emotion or recollection causing a consumer to pick one product over another. Today, not using the right word might allow a competitor’s website to slip in ahead of or instead of yours in a search or online ad campaign. That’s why the development of word clouds and analytics has become so important. Specific word selection and the ongoing tracking and tweaking of the ones you use are critical parts of the equation for most of your Internet marketing. In some forums, you even have to pay more to use certain words ahead of your competition.
That doesn’t bother John at all. If the word he ought to use isn’t available, he’ll just pick another. Sooner or later, you’ll hear the music and figure out what he’s trying to say.