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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

I had to click into the article to understand the title of this post. Somehow the sentence structure of the post title didn't seem to make sense to me.

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Was the use of "ask" as a noun the problem?

I needed 3 googles to understand the etymology. But seriously, why is ask being nounified where other verbs are not. I think it has something to do with the culture, but I cannot place my finger on it.

It's either New York-ese or investment banker-ese (hard to distinguish between the two sometimes). They also nounify "spend" for some reason.

Ask as a shorted version of Ask Price is something I can understand. But the other uses I see appear awkward.

What the heck does "Ask Price" mean? Never heard that.

"Ask" as a noun, however, I hear all the time...and not from bankers or New Yorkers. It's very common in Bay Area tech.

In the business world, ask has been used as a noun at least since 1985 ("I understand it's a big ask...")[1]

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001331.h...

Goes back at least as far as 1781:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-shoul...

Nouning verbs (like verbing nouns) is very common in English, to the extent it's often unclear which came first.

That was part of it - to my mind, the title was this agglomerated collection of words that needed decoding: "what's the noun / verb / etc.... ack, to heck with it, I'll click on the article and figure it out from there"

I know there's a limit on title length. If I may suggest a good eyeball catching title for this would be:

"It took Bezos 60 tries for him to get $1M for Amazon from 22 investors"

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