Strange New Olympic verbs....

[Nibble]

I'm watching the diving. I thought that the verb "to medal" was bad enough.

In diving, the dives are graded according to degrees of difficulty, which affect the judges' marks.

The commentator has just said "that dive is 'out-degree-of-difficultying' the previous one...."

[THECORBYLOON]

Medal used as a verb has been in use since at least 1822, see here, http://blog.oxforddic...s-whos-medalling-now/

[FredPuli43]

No worse than outdoing! (And there's nowt wrong with that).

[jno]

sorry to see the OED using spike when they just mean rise, TCL. If spike is to be used in this statistical sense it ought to mean a sharp rise followed by a sharp fall, since that's what a spike looks like.

I suppose we would once have said "bemedalled", but the prefix be- doesn't get used much in modern English.

[THECORBYLOON]

To be fair to the commentator, he did go on to say "...if there is such a word." and his mate said they'd been making up new words for the last two weeks.

[jno]

I loved that Calvin and Hobbes link

http://www.jonathanne...ingWeirdsLanguage.gif

(One of the very few comic strips named after philosophers)

[Duncer]

Podiuming is one that bothers me.

[jno]

if "staging" a play is okay, "podiuming" an athlete ought to be. It's a clumsy word to say, though.

[Duncer]

I "podiumed" an athlete last night sounds wrong in so many ways.

[THECORBYLOON]

Soon, folk won't win, they'll "gold"...

[Quizmonster]

Using one part of speech - eg noun as verb - has been part of the development of English for ages. Whether these coinages find a lasting place in the language depends entirely on whether speakers find it convenient or worth using.
Thus 'to medal' is here to stay, given - as TCL says above - that it has been around for about 200 years. To 'out-degree-of-difficulty' I can confidently predict will not catch on for the simple reason that it will never replace 'more difficult than'!