One of my favorite cookbooks is a compilation of recipes from Cooking Light magazine. My favorite thing that it has taught me how to make is nasi goreng:
Poking around on the Cooking Light website, I found that my hometown of San Francisco ranks 5th on their list of “Cooking Light Best Cities” for healthy eating. Before getting into the foody fun, the article gives an overview of life in the city and includes a striking instruction with a predicted outcome:
Ask residents what they love about the city by the bay, and many will tell you that it’s that ‘daydream’ is an active verb here.Whoa, really? I’ve never heard of such a study!
There are several reasons why this sentence is so interesting, but just doesn't work for me...
Daydream as an active verb?
A verb is traditionally said to be in the active voice when the subject is the agent or actor of the verb. In the sentence Alex bakes that cake once a year, bakes is an active verb because Alex, the subject, is the one doing the action of baking. A corresponding passive sentence would be That cake was baked by Alex, in which the subject of the sentence is that cake and it is the one that is having the action done to.
How about when we talk about the activeness or passiveness of daydreaming? In the sentence Rudy daydreams about Golden Gate Park, daydream is an active verb. How about a corresponding passive version? ?Golden Gate Park is daydreamed about by many people sounds a little awkward, but could work. In these sentences, daydream takes an indirect object - would a direct object make any difference? Well, *Rudy daydreams Golden Gate Park doesn’t sound right, and neither does its passive version, *Golden Gate Park was daydreamed by Rudy.
So if I did ask the question that Cooking Light suggests and residents really responded in the described manner, what would these residents possibly mean? In San Francisco, you can daydream about things, but nothing can be daydreamed about? What?
To be sure, Cooking Light did not specify the lexical category of the word they quote - they could be telling us that the noun, daydream, (not the verb, as I’ve interpreted it) is an active verb. They could therefore be reporting a change in lexical category of daydream, which brings this discussion even closer in line with Mark Liberman's and Geoff Nunberg’s analyses of claims such as, “Faith is a verb,” and, “Friendship is a verb” (see here, here, and here).
What is probably happening, really, is the writer has a vague memory of the term active verb and has since assumed that an active verb is one that refers to physical activity. The attempted “cleverness” would be that in San Francisco, people live out their daydreams in a physically active way. But that is not what an active verb is, Cooking Light.
Why would one daydream in San Francisco?
Whatever it is they are trying to say about daydreaming, I’m confused as to why an article meant to praise San Francisco would emphasize residents’ daydreaming at all. If you live in San Francisco and San Francisco is so great, why would you be daydreaming about anything? Wouldn’t you be out enjoying the city? If you are daydreaming (even if you are doing it “actively”), doesn’t that mean you are imagining yourself somewhere else? Perhaps the use of daydream is supposed to elicit thoughts of things sometimes associated with daydreaming - misty clouds, surreal beauty, and carefreeness - albeit with complete disregard for what the word means to most people.
A linguified claim
Regardless of whatever the folks at Cooking Light think they are saying about the activeness of daydreaming, I hope they don’t really expect us to believe that one can ask San Francisco residents what they love about their city and expect to get some answer about active daydreaming. This is an example of something Geoffrey Pullum has written about, and which I find fascinating: linguification. When a claim (claim 1, let’s say) about something in the world is linguified, it is seated in a completely different claim (claim 2) that makes reference to words or other linguistic items associated with claim 1.
An example that Pullum found:
It's difficult to find a piece of writing in the mainstream press which mentions the word 'bisexual' without finding that it is immediately followed by the word 'chic'.The writer of this sentence is trying to say something about an allegedly prevalent view of bisexuality as "chic" (claim 1), but does so with a completely different claim (claim 2) about obligatory word adjacency. This second claim is linguified version of the first.
In Cooking Light, the writer takes a claim about San Francisco, which itself is unclear for all the reasons above. Let’s pretend we get it, and call claim 1: “There are a lot of outdoorsy things to do in San Francisco.” Then, in claim 2, the writer makes a statement about the grammatical voice of a verb (daydream) that is ambiguously related to claim 1. The writer couldn’t possibly think that the statement is true, but for some reason decided to make a point about San Francisco in the form of a made-up pseudoscientific survey in which a question about a city’s appeal was answered by “many” in terms of the grammatical voice of a verb.
I fail to see how this linguification enriches this article in any way - I could see how some of Pullum’s examples of linguification could be humorous to some people, but this just doesn’t work here. It reeks of BS and hokeyness.
Thanks, Cooking Light, for at least talking about the joys of my city, but please, let’s spend more time working on those recipes and food travel tips and a little less on grammar. I need to figure out why my eggplant always turns brown and never stays purple - get to work on that, will you?
P.S. This post is getting long, but a topic for a future post: all the other things that are revealed to be "active verbs" by a Google search for "is an active verb," like aging, educate, and hope.