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Perhaps you noticed that I did the very thing I intend to gripe about in the title of this post - that is, turning a noun into a verb simply by adding the ending: -ing.

Here is the situation (and why my hackles are up about it): listening to some AM radio (they talk a lot there, and I sometimes turn over to some St. Louis stations to get more information--not about anything, just more information), the topic du jour was Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend. The two men carrying on the discussion were frothing at the mouth about how the whole story was a carrying out of a huge deception against the American (especially the sports fan) public. One of the men correctly (in usage if not in context) contended that the Notre Dame athlete was "perpetrating a fraud" while his friend agreed by saying that the young man was "frauding the American public."

When I first heard the word "fraud" used in that sense I thought that perhaps I was mistaken in my understanding of the word. After all, these men were broadcast professionals. Surely they would have a vocabulary and know how to use it. But the offense continued to niggle at me until I had to look it up. And as I suspected the word "fraud" is a noun. It denotes an act of deceit or the person who tricks another. As such the word doesn't accept the -ing ending as if the fraud is being performed at that moment or toward someone (even if it is).

But take heart! There is a verb form of the word "fraud." And that word is (drum roll please) "defraud". This handy little word is a transitive verb (meaning it has an object) that indicates the action that carries with it fraud against someone. In other words, while you cannot "fraud your neighbor," you can most certainly "defraud him".

There are a number of other nouns that we have grown fond of using as verbs simply by adding the -ing ending (I'll save the list for another time), but in a profession of communicators (in this case radio broadcasters) isn't it time we learned the correct verb form of a noun before indulging in verbification?

For those of my readers who get hot under the collar because the local stores have full-blown Christmas displays beginning in late August, stop reading now!

For those of you who decided to stick with me, Christmas spirit has come. One radio station in the major market in which I live started playing all Christmas, all the time last Friday. This doesn't bother me as it does some, simply because I'm a Christmas Junkie--I love (almost) all Christmas junk (whether it's really junk or the real thing). I cry over showings of It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas.

[aside] My only beef with the radio playing so much Seasonal music is that on the day they started I hear the Euthrythmics' version of "Winter Wonderland" twice in the same day. If you're going to play all Christmas format, there is enough material out there that you don't have to repeat the same song (let alone the same version of a song) more than once in a 24-hour period. [aside over]

Anyway, for all of you but Bill Crider, who might take offense at the crocodile line, here's a little Christmas cheer:

I heard that one of the most familiar voices of our time has been silenced. I recall many days when we would listen for Paul Harvey's commentary as we had breakfast (as I grew older, I discovered some stations played him in the middle of the day). Like many, my favorite part was when he would tell "The REST of the story." I could almost see him turning the page after an inserted commercial for the Bose acoustic wave machine or some other sponsor, and he would say, "page 3."

It seemed that one of the things that helped begin the day was to hear Paul say, "Hello, Americans . . . " concluding with a hearty "Good Day!"

Thanks, Paul, for the memories, for the laughter, and for making us sometimes think about what we thought.