1152: Marvin Gaye is a Verb Feb 3, 2018

The line “let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on” from the song 'Marvin Gaye' uses the name of said artist as a verb, which is fairly obvious, but more specifically the lyrics use it as one word. It can easily be thought of as two words given that it uses both two parts of someone’s given name, which can often be thought of as two elements, but the grammar shows otherwise. In the term ‘store-owner’ as opposed to ‘storage’, while both are single words coming somehow from ‘store’, the ‘-age’ of ‘storage’ (here not referring to the noun ‘age’) cannot function as its own word, whereas both ‘store’ an ‘owner’ can function independently of each other. Here, Marvin Gaye is also not a compound, but to be clear, that is not to say that ‘Marvin’ or ‘Gaye’ cannot exist on their own as verbs theoretically even, but because this example is using his name quite inventively, only it has semantic meaning that could allow for the syntax to do what it does.

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