Verbing Spell Names And Other Grammatical Transfigurations

This essay is a brief look at some of the ways in which spell names are transformed into verbs and other vernacular forms in the Harry Potter books. "Verbing," as it is cutely named, is a common practise in spoken English, although verbed nouns are often counted as slang or nonstandard when they first appear, many eventually make it into the dictionaries because of their wide use. For example, a bus is a vehicle for transporting people. We now have the verb "to bus," meaning to transport people via bus. "They bused the students from the closed school to another facility."

By way of introduction to my background, I am a professional writer and editor, and my college degree is in Linguistics, so I think about this sort of thing a lot. I started looking into this when some other writers and I were chatting one night, and one of them thought my use of the made-up verb "Legilimise" was odd. I argued that J. K. Rowling herself set the precedent for the verbing of spell names, but I only recalled it being in dialogue, as if it could be slang or vernacular idiom. A look at the books tonight, though, shows that the narrative itself uses some forms, too.

Here are the data points I looked at tonight. I am using American editions, though my own spelling may be somewhat British since I'm just used to that when writing about HP. (Go figure.)

( Summoning, being Imperiused, and Stunning versus Stupefying )