The verbing of "Green"

[mavjop]

It frustrates me greatly that people have started to use green as a verb, as in:

"Green your organisation!"
"The greening of CompanyName"
etc.

As if it wasn't sufficiently lazy (albeit perfectly ok; I don't have a problem with it) to shorten "We're making CompanyName environmentally friendly" to "We're making CompanyName green" ... now it has to

Comments

[mavjop]

Verbing angries me! Sometimes.

[mavjop]

Just a little. Not entirely on-topic, but feeling-wise, not too far off. :)

[anonymous]

The concept of "greening" has been around for decades. The past 10 years have seen an enormous uptick in interest in the concept in the construction industry, in particular, coinciding with the rise of LEED and the US Green Building Council.

It's a very concise way of expressing a complicated concept, which is that you intend to make your company more environmentally sensitive, and adopt technology towards that end.

[mavjop]

The concept isn't the issue.

The wording is.

The concept of making a company environmentally friendly, or of making it green (a synonym), has existed for ages.

I am pretty sure it is doublethink that "greening" has existed for decades just because it maps to a concept which has existed for decades.

Can you point me to a single usage of "green[ing]" as a verb for making environmentally friendly in a publication greater than a year old?

[Edit] BTW, "US Green Building Concept" is an appropriate adjectival usage of the word green, not proof of its use as a verb.

[scrump]

http://www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org/garden/pgpubs.html

There's at least one use from 2003, in http://www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org/phlgreen/ui_planning_openspace.html, but the Society itself dates back to 1974.

Page 57 (among many, many others) of Business and the Environment, published in 1996, and viewable at http://books.google.com/books?id=i7UDHlOGfPEC.

"The Greening of Accountancy: The Profession After Pearce", published in 1990.

[mavjop]

I stand corrected on it not existing before a year ago, then!

I still think it sucks, and it has apparently become popular very recently.

It doesn't seem to me like it communicates more to use it as a verb than to use it as an adjective.

[loosestrife]

The word grabbed a lot of attention when Charles Reich's The Greening of America was published. (I just looked it up -- 1970. Huh. I thought it was later than that.) The title didn't refer specifically to environmental concern, but to the whole counterculture.

I think it's occasionally popped up since then, but the exclusively environmental meaning is relatively recent and has been all the hell over the place lately.

You know what I hate even more than that? When people talk about "growing" a company. Urgh. You develop or maybe even nurture a company. You grow tomatoes.

Which I guess is green, though most tomatoes are red.

[mavjop]

Intriguing!

I guess there's been usage out there that I haven't been aware of, but it's become obvious lately with the fact that, as you so eloquently put it, "the exclusively environmental meaning ... has been all the hell over the place lately."