It's not a new phenomenon, but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We all use them, often without noticing what we're doing.
I was arranging to meet someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and my friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a tentative one!
Many of these new verbs are linked to new technology. An obvious example is the word fax, which is a shortening of facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used to sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing something and promising we'd fax it immediately. So, nouns turn into verbs in two easy stages. Then along came email, and we were soon all emailing each other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without my daily emails.
Email reminds me, of course， of my puter and its software, which has produced another couple of new verbs. On my puter I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web that I think I'll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of remembering their addresses and calling them up from scratch. I can do the same thing on my PC, but there I don't bookmark; I favorite—ing from “favorite pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun． I wasn’t really sure whether people said this，but someone told me recently that they had favorited a site I was looking for and so they could easily give me its address.
In the late 1980s I noticed that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like “I’ll page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn't say it to me, though; 1 refused to have one． So my children bought me a mobile phone, now known simply as a mobile and I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message someone, that is, I can leave a message （either spoken or written）for them on their phone．Or I can text them, write a few words suggesting when and where to meet, for example. How long will it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them using my mobile? I haven’t heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it myself!
【小题1】“I’ll pencil it in my diary” in the second paragraph probably means .A．it was a firm arrangement B．it was an uncertain arrangementC．the arrangement should be written as a diaryD．he prefers a pencil to a pen【小题2】A website address can be easily found if it has been＿ .A．emailed B．messaged C．favoritedD．texted【小题3】Which of the following has not been used as a verb, yet?A．messageB．pageC．email D．mobile【小题4】The best title for this passage is ．A．New Verbs from Old NounsB．The Development of the English languageC．New Technology and New wordsD．Technology and Language.B
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(答案→)B
解析：
【小题1】从第二段中作者对他朋友说的话“ You can ink it in.”的解释可“ I’ll pencil it in my diary”与其意义相反。所以B项正确。
【小题2】 从第四段最后一句可知答案。
【小题3】从最后一段可知page、message、email都用作动词，唯有mobile 这一词还没有内人们用作动词。
【小题4】文章第一段用问句提出论点，即人们发现用许多名词用作动词这一新的语言现象。