Mark Liberman has pointed out, in response to a comment at Simple Bits, that the use of reveal as a noun is nothing new. If you find that odd, here's an amuse (or perhaps a disturb): it turns out that a great many English verbs used to make perfectly fine nouns, but somehow lost this ability. Some of my personal favorites include announce, arrive, remove, divulge, and annoy.
In Old English, there were numerous ways to make nouns from verbs. Some of these involved special noun-creating endings, like -nes (as in ābrēotnes 'extermination', from ābrēotan 'destroy'), -ung (as in smirung 'anointment', from smierwan 'smear, anoint'), and so on. Some were rather irregular (dǣd 'deed', from dōn 'to do'). But perhaps the most common way to form abstract nouns from verbs was to take the verb root and simply slap on case endings directly—often creating a strong feminine noun (ending in -u) or a strong masculine noun (no ending at all). For example, the verb faran 'to travel, go' had two nouns derived from it: fær and faru, both meaning 'way, going, journey').
Over time, the -u endings fell off (along with most of the verb endings), leaving many nouns that looked more or less identical to their corresponding verbs. Thus was born a robust process of "zero derivation." As a flood of French verbs entered the language, they acquired noun forms by zero derivation, too. Many of these deverbal nouns (of both English and French origin) have stuck with us, and we don't bat an eye at them (turn, slide, ride, bite, ...). But somewhere along the way, a bunch of deverbal nouns got lost. For example, Shakespeare writes in Hamlet IV.5 81: "Next, your own son gone, and he most violent author of his own just remove", where remove means death. (The OED defines this use of remove as "the act of removing a person by death; murder"). Remove just can't be used as a noun this way anymore.
The OED is a treasure trove of other examples:
Others include depart, reduce, produce, maintain, retain, detain, deploy, retire, acquit, greet, defend, divulge, startle, entertain, amaze, and vanish.
In addition to these examples, there are also some "frozen" deverbal nouns, which still occur, but only in a particular phrase or idiom: employ (as in "in his employ"), compare ("beyond compare"), fancy ("flights of fancy"), and say ("have one's say"). These, too, seem to go back to more general uses, such as:
The real ask, then is not how "the big reveal" got its make, but rather, why is it such a startle? What caused the vanish of so many perfectly good nouns?
Incidentally, it's possible that all those live reveals on Trading Spaces are a rather different phenomenon. As a parallel, consider the word vanish. Until recently, this verb could also occur as a noun (1872 'MARK TWAIN' Roughing It iii. 33 "He..left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish."). Nowadays, however, the only people using it as a noun are magicians, who use it quite routinely to describe disappearing acts. For instance (quoted from a page on magic for kids): "With a magical gesture reveal the vanish of the coin, then make it re-appear wherever you want." It seems that the magician's use of vanish is meant to indicate the act, or performance, of causing something to vanish. The reveal seems to have a similar flavor; it sounds like a bit of reality-TV board-room lingo for a packaged act, that has slipped onto the screen.
Then again, recent creations like freshman admits (=admittees), new hires, and the like, might just show that zero derivation to create nouns from verbs in English is not totally dead, it's just having a dwindle.
Posted by Adam Albright at May 22, 2004 05:15 AM