:::::I was former military and totally familiar with “stand down”, but not with “stand up” as they’ve been using it. (Still grates on my ears.)::::::
Additional gubmint-speak that drives me crazy....
They stood up a new taskforce.
What was the spend for that project?
They were efforting passage of the bill.
Do you want me to calendar that meeting?
After we negotiated, we papered a contract.
The were tasked to complete the plan.
The phenomenon of verbing spans several other, slightly broader phenomena - some of which intersect or are subsets of one another.
Anthimeria is the rhetorical use of a word as if it were a member of a different word class. I would expect that most examples of verbing begin as rhetorical devices.
Conversion, also called zero derivation, is the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form. ("I will table this")
If a new word is formed "(I am tabling this") this is an example of derivation, the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word
Because changing the class of a word changes the syntax of the word, all of these are examples of a functional shift, which occurs when an existing word takes on a new syntactic function.
So it would appear that there isn't a term synonymous with "verbing" that was used before that term was coined, but I would expect one or more of the above would have been used to describe the phenomenon.
Of course, the word "verbing" is itself an example of verbing!
For FR: Don't slide the thread, bro.
Enjoyable Lingo Slide!!!
I hear you about the stand up. I think they are using the slangish term incorrectly. When I think of stand up, I think about something like the Iraqi military. It was flat on the ground. Our job was to stand it up, make something resembling an operational military unit.
Now they are using it when there is a better verb available, to mobilize. That usually means it’s an euphemism: they must think mobilization is too scary a word, associated with marshall(sic) law so they’ve changed it. Typical.