Back in the days when boys were boys and girls were girls, nouns were nouns and verbs were verbs (aside from the few exceptions that were both), and they would be brought together in time-honoured fashion through well constructed sentences. But in these days of Internet-speak, contractions and weird re-appropriation of numbers and symbols abound, and a word can mean just about anything.
One of the early examples of a proper noun becoming a verb was Hoover, which was the name of a large vacuum cleaner manufacturer. Their marketing people thought they’d be clever, and coined the term ‘to hoover’ as an alternative to ‘to vacuum’. Smart move, you might say, to get people to associated the action exclusively with their brand. But in the end, it meant that they lost control of their own brand, as it was adopted as a common-use word. This is what is known as a genericized trademark.
