EU English "Dictionary"

Came across this http://euenglish.webs.com/ recently. If you click the image you get a 50-odd page PDF of English words as used by the EU. I haven't had time to peruse all in full but suspect there are some gems hiding in there. I came across "badge" which according to the EU pundits cannot be used as a verb (as in "the new prefect was badged by the headmaster") which will be good news to many grammar police but not to those who hold that every noun can be verbified and vice-versa. The introduction has a paragraph on countable/uncountable nouns which it says is a frequent source of problems. Some words in the list such as "actorness" I've never come across elsewhere.

I like your use of the word, "verbified" in the same sentence as you are saying not to do it. ;-)

Gawd, I see things in that document that have recently plagued me in documents from some of our clients. I spend an afternoon stamping on use of "in case of" to mean "if" in a suite of forms last month.

What you need to bear in mind with that document is that it’s very specific to the situation of European institutions where there are a lot more native speakers of French (and the other Romance languages) than of English. Almost all the typical errors are caused by using an English word as though it is the similar-looking French word. Where I used to work, this sort of thing was much worse 30 years ago than in the last few years, because a lot of people from countries with Germanic and Slavic languages came in. But the standard of French went down accordingly...

>1 PossMan: Re “badge” - the author of the document isn’t objecting to turning “badge” into a verb, he’s pointing out that the specific sense in which it’s used as a verb in institutional jargon - i.e. to touch your ID card to a reader - doesn’t correspond to normal English. He probably wouldn’t have anything against your example.

>4 thorold:: I was also thinking of BBC sports commentators who have sometimes been criticized for talking about Olympic athletes being "medalled". I take your reproof that I was taking the document a bit out of context.

Just came across another article here from Mental Floss with other examples:-
http://mentalfloss.com/article/69699/11-examples-odd-dialect-called-eu-english

Again the first example is about the verb "to precise" but I have never before come across this word.

>2 krazy4katz:
Well, "verbified" isn't quite an example of that (though"verbed" would be). The -ify suffix and all.