...you fragrance; he, she, it fragrances. (Those are wind chimes, to the left. They have no relation to fragrance but it was a pretty blue sky.)
For some time, a commercial for Glade air fresheners has been bugging me. (Not again with the air fresheners! you cry. Yes, indeed, and sorry about that.) It advertises these plug-in whatevers as "a whole new idea in fragrancing." I'm bothered because I consider myself a fairly hip, happ'nin' kind of person, but I have no ideas at all about "fragrancing." "Fragrances," perhaps. "Adding fragrance to your house," possibly. But not "fragrancing." And now I discover there are old ideas about fragrancing, which puts me even farther behind.
Tell me, what's wrong with saying, "A whole new idea in fragrance," aside from the fact that fragrance really isn't an idea, but let's focus on my issue, OK?
I am writing about "fragrancing" today because of another commercial I heard last night. Safeway in Canada is running some kind of "collect cards and win" (yeah, right) contest. As the pleasant woman's voice reads the fine print (slowly, which is a nice change), she mentions that "millions in prizing are available to be won."
Now, I do understand that this is legal-hedge-speak for "we won't give out many prizes but you keep on buying our stuff, okay?" But what's with the "prizing" bit? "To prize" is actually a verb; as in, "I prize my collection of interesting coffee mugs." But "prize" is more often used as a noun, as in "The prize for playing our game is an interesting coffee mug!"
But anyway, these things--fragrances and prizes--are already nouns, why put -ings on them (pretending "fragrance" had spent time as a verb), and then use them as nouns again? I mean, "This freshener really fragrances the room" sounds ridiculous, but it is at least using the verb as a verb. So what's with the process of double-nouning? I don't get it.
Hey, wait a sec--I have an idea about "fragrancing" after all!! It's "Let's stop using the term 'fragrancing' altogether! And the same goes for 'prizing'!"
I think my fragrancing idea is newer than Glade's.
