One of the common grammar errors that really sets my teeth to grinding is the use of “login”, “backup”, and the like as verbs. “Click to login” drives me nuts. I’ve mentioned it before, and my august sister pointed out the perfect argument to make my point: “You would never say ‘I loginned’, would you?” Today, this sentence reached me:
**EG-Delicious-Sync** backups the Delicious links into WordPress links database, and gives you many Delicious features.
I suspect that the writer of the above sentence was not a native English speaker, but has seen backup misused so often that he naturally treated it as a regular verb. This is how it begins. Backups, as the plural of backup, will get by the spelling checkers, but come on. I imagine that in another couple of decades we will indeed be reading and hearing about people who backupped their data. And I will be the crazy old curmudgeon grumbling in the corner.
Once again demonstrating your Anti-Babelist tendencies.
Are you curmudgeoning again?
I want to see a widget here: “click to Loggins” that takes me directly to the theme song to ‘Top Gun.’
“Hiiighwaaay to…THE DANGER ZONE!”
I sent this message to the folks at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show a few minutes ago:
I wonder what effect (if any) that will have on the submission I’m preparing…
Were you loginned when you sent it? If not, hopefully they won’t realize that it was you…
This to Swink Magazine Online this afternoon:
Once again I have to wonder whether what this will do to my chances of getting accepted.
And then their automatic response was funny and upbeat and a reminder that the whole magazine is a labor of love.
“I just logged on a second ago”
To log on is a legitimate verb, I mean come on, loginned? Couldn’t you have thought of something better than that.
In your own response you correctly used log on and not logon, demonstrating my point.
‘To log in’ (or ‘to log on’) is certainly a legitimate verb. ‘To login’ (or ‘to logon’) is not. The test of conjugating the hypothetical verb is what yields ‘loginned’, and demonstrates the incorrectness of using login as a verb.