"Exhale" as a Noun

[labingi]

Silly question but when did "exhale" become a noun? I've been seeing it everywhere in fan fic lately, everywhere an "exhale," not one fic with an "exhalation"--or a "he exhaled." I figured it was a fan fic thing.

Then I saw an "exhale" in the poem "Forgotten Portraits," on my son's AP test study list.

The dictionaries are pretty much still telling me "exhale" is a verb.

This is, of course, all my language snobbery and utterly irrelevant, but when did this happen? What memo did I miss?

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Nouning verbs and verbing nouns everywhere!

[labingi]

It's positively Shakespearean!

[vilakins]

That one I hadn't noticed, but I've noticed that subject and object pronouns are now swapped for more than one person.
Examples:
Me and him went on a daytrip.
Him and her gave Bob and I a gift.

It makes me wince each time, and if it's going to be the new norm, it's one I just can't adopt (and I like a lot of language innovations).

[genarti]

I would have said "on the exhale" and "on an exhale" were standard in certain contexts (singing, deep breathing, etc, but I plugged it into Google Ngram thing, and for all variations I could think of it was an invisibly low line until it hit somewhere in the 80s-90s and then ramped up dramatically, into the present. So I guess it's newer than I thought!

[labingi]

Interesting! You really did the research on that. Guess it's older than I thought.

[labingi]

Interesting. I don't often notice that one. Is it more common in NZ? I don't think you need to feel any pressure to change your own dialect; that's the point of language rights movements, isn't it? :)

[vilakins]

I hear it here sometimes, more often in the UK online (friends, FB groups etc), and very often in dialogue in UK and some US novels. It surprised me about US novels did it too as I'd originally assumed it was a UK thing. Greg does it all the time and I'm not sure where he picked it up as he doesn't do social media or read novels. He likes lots of US podcasts and videos that have coloured his language, but this one is odd. I've seen and heard it so much in the last 10 years or so, I'm sure that it's language change in action.

[labingi]

Interesting. I'm pondering my students' discourse, and it may be that I just don't see many sentences discussing two pronouns as a subject: "Him and me went...." I do get a lot of "Me and my sister went...."

Language, it's a funny old thing, huh?

[vilakins]

Actually it would be "me and him" because the first person comes first these days, instead of the polite second I was taught at school (he and I, her and me) - another big difference. It makes me feel a bit obsolete. I enjoy language innovation and neologisms, but object/subject swap is just wrong and illogical.

[whitebird]

Weird. I haven't noticed this, as I haven't been reading much, but I don't like it!

[labingi]

I don't like it either. There's no good reason for that, just language prejudice, but what are you going to do? :)