It could be the first of many Miss Jannsenisms, but I've promised not too, at least not too often. I was peering at Cathy's handful of coupons in the supermarket, she shrugged and said "I'm a Clipper". It suggested both that it could be something to be ashamed of, and that she wasn't ashamed at all.
It also signified to me, someone highly comfortable with language. An instantaneous addition of the -er suffix to the verb to clip to make a term for a certain type of shopper - yes, its a feature of all language that it is productive - but only some people dash off new words with quite such aplomb. (This meaning of Clipper doesn't even show up on Urban Dictionary, so I figure it must be unique)
I think it stuck in my mind particularly because whilst it made sense to me, in the UK, we don't clip coupons, we cut them out...
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What you have is a gerund: a noun from a verb. The process is called conversion and is a common way to form new words. Nominalizing takes a verb or adjective and uses it as a noun as with "I'm a clipper." Verbing takes a noun and forms it into a verb as in "Google this." Which I did. In the process I found this clever little excerpt from Calvin & Hobbes:
ReplyDeleteCalvin: I like to verb words.
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed. . . . Verbing weirds language.
Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.