Last week in Georgia, the police used a taser on an 87-year-old woman, Martha Al-Bishara, who was cutting dandelions with a kitchen knife. The woman, who is a Syrian immigrant and does not speak English, was outside the local Boys & Girls Club near her home in search of dandelions for a salad.
Others are already debating how the police handled the situation, and I can only imagine how scary all of this was for Martha Al-Bishara. I am writing about it for Lingua Franca for a linguistic reason. You may have noted the circumlocution I used in the opening sentence: “used a taser on.” Why not just use the verb form of taser, Anne?
Well, what is the verb form of taser? This question was brought to my attention by a journalist I know who forwarded the screenshot above, with the tweet: “Police tase 87-year-old grandmother who used knife to cut dandelions.” He saw no good reason that the verb wouldn’t be taser. I loved the question and emailed back to say, “I’m on it!”
A few hours later, my journalist acquaintance emailed again with a second tweet, this one from WUSA9: “Georgia police taser 87-year-old grandmother who was cutting flowers for not following orders.” Clearly we are not all in agreement about what the verb of taser is.
The noun Taser (or TASER) is a trademark, which is why I capitalized it, as standard dictionaries do as well — although in much published writing you will find it not capitalized (as I am also doing in this blog post). While many people use the term generically, the electroshock or conducted-energy weapon Taser is technically a brand, sold by Axon. Taser is also an acronym — or so the story goes — for “Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle.” The name is derived from the 1911 book by Victor Appleton (a pen name), Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, which was a favorite of the man who invented the taser weapon. You will notice that in the book title, the s and a are in the “wrong order.” (See this piece in The Guardian for more on the racism in the book and how that should inflect the origin story of the word taser.)
Taser is far from the first trademarked noun to be used generically (e.g., Xerox, Kleenex) or to develop a corresponding verb (e.g., Google, Xerox). With some of the other trademarked terms, the verb has been derived through straightforward functional shift: Google (noun) > Google (verb); Xerox (noun) > Xerox (verb). Neither of those examples, though, is as vulnerable to back-formation as the noun Taser. With that final -er, Taser is open to reinterpretation as a two-morpheme word, with a base verb and an -er suffix. If mowers mow and pointers point, then tasers could tase.
If the appearance of pointers has you thinking about laser pointers, then my turning to the word laser at this moment will seem even more natural.
The acronym laser (“light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) has gone through a similar back-formation to create the verb lase. It has also undergone functional shift to create the verb laser. The past tense forms lased and lasered, according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, have been used with about equal frequency over the past few decades, until fairly recently when lased started to decline in use; the participle lasing appears to have a robust life in scientific writing.
In terms of the verb form of taser, tase got a boost in 2007 with the “Don’t tase me, bro!” incident at the University of Florida. But the Corpus of Contemporary American English shows tased and tasered neck-in-neck, with tazed as a much less preferred variant.
I was telling a colleague about this initial research this week, and he asked, “So which form will you advocate?” I responded genuinely, “Why can’t we use both?” I do think it isn’t bad for us — actually, I think it is downright good for us — to be comfortable with variation in what is considered standard. Our brains can handle having two verbs derived from the noun taser that mean exactly the same thing. Then rather than debating which verb form to use, we can debate the much more important issues that surround the use of tasers.