Sentence firstto Agatha Christie (v.tr.)
The conversion of nouns to verbs (to impact, to medal, to leverage, to architect) is a continual object of criticism and word rage. But language has been verbing for as long as it has languaged. In fact, there’s nothing that can’t be verbed if you put your mind to it.
‘What about someone’s name?’ you might ask. ‘What about Agatha Christie?’
I’m glad you picked that example. Because the new FX series Alien: Earth offers this great line in its second episode, ‘Mr. October’ (a mild swear word follows):
Context, with a tiny spoiler in the first line:
In the year 2120, a military search-and-rescue team are investigating a spaceship that has crashed to Earth. When a grisly but intriguing discovery threatens to detain them unduly, Siberian (played by Diêm Camille) makes the call to keep moving:
Okay, come on. We’re search and rescue. Let forensics Agatha Christie this shit.
To Agatha Christie something, then, is to figure it out; to investigate and solve a puzzling problem in the manner of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, Christie’s fictional detectives.
I like this verbing because it reads like improvised slang. There’s no suggestion that the phrase has currency as a verbal eponym, whether broadly in-world or more specifically in Siberian’s own usage or that of one of her speech communities. Rather, it’s an impromptu linguistic innovation that’s both playful and bookish.
It also celebrates Christie’s enduring popularity as a mystery author. What other name could fit in this semantic slot? Only a fictional one, I think: Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, or Sam Spade – but not Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett.
Other contenders include Jessica Fletcher, Perry Mason, Columbo, Jules Maigret, Nancy Drew, Inspector Morse, and Special Agent Dale Cooper. But it’s more of a stretch to imagine them being so culturally salient in a century’s time.
Alien: Earth was created by Noah Hawley, who also has the writing credit on the episode. He’s probably not even the first person to verb Agatha Christie, but for once I didn’t bother trying to Agatha Christie it.
Updates:
A couple of nice examples from Bluesky: @iucounu tells me his wife uses Poirot as a verb: ‘”Don’t worry, I’ll Poirot that,” she says, when she’s going to ferret out some bit of gossip’.
And Jesse Sheidlower sent me this verbing of Agatha Christie in Ryan Rayston’s novel The Quiet Sound of Disappearing (2011):
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Further reading:
In my A–Z of English usage myths, I wrote that peevers hate verbing, but only when they think it’s new – they constantly use verbings that were established earlier. Who remembers all the yelling and wailing over contact (v.)? Who would believe there even was such a controversy?
See also: ‘Verb all the things’; ‘Verbing weirds language – but in a good way’; and ‘Verbing and nouning are fine and here’s a quiz‘. And a few other posts about detective fiction.
#AgathaChristie #AlienEarth #conversion #detective #detectiveFiction #eponyms #humour #language #languageChange #NoahHawley #pragmatics #screenwriting #semantics #slang #TV #verbing #verbs #writing
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