Travel broadens the mind, it’s said. I’m not sure where that leaves commuting, and its potential to stimulate good ideas.
But it does allow the linguist space to contemplate why words do different things, and try out a few alternatives, without too much distraction.
I was thinking about nouns turning into verbs, as they often do in English. Why would nouns that seem related, or at least similar in content, work so differently when they become verbs?
Bag and sack are my examples – to bag someone for your team is very different from sacking someone, semantically.
I started to think about other related options. You can dog someone’s footsteps; you can also hound them – those would seem to have a similar impact.  Not all of them work: we can cap someone (in sport) but we don’t seem to hat them, for some reason.
Some nouns seem to be missing a trick, not going for verb conversion (to continue the sport metaphors).
You would think that someone would see the potential of baconing, as an alternative to chickening, or worse, goosing.  But with news of pig infections in recent days, we are perhaps rightly cautious, for now.
Perhaps it’s down to me choosing some very everyday nouns for my examples, which could allow for more imaginative metaphors when they become verbs, because they’re so widely understood.  You can understand that ones related to animals or food would more easily be taken into new contexts, for example.
If we look at who’s doing all this verb conversion, a big contribution must be made by business, constantly chasing the next fresh image as well as the bottom line.
Some must come out spontaneously, with someone not quite selecting the right word, but realising that the new coining has impact, and using it again.
So, the next time your bus is taking ages to move along its route, or whatever other commuting option you have, test out a few nouns for me, and let me know if you’ve got any more examples where seemingly related nouns behave completely differently as verbs.
And create some new ones, if you fancy. Where the economy may be shrinking, language is thankfully almost always expanding.