Login is not a verb?
John Gruber linked to “Login” is not a verb today. This website presents the argument that login, along with other similar words such as shutdown, signup, etc., form a class of words that are commonly considered to be verbs (especially among computer types), but are, in fact not.
The argument is based on analyzing these words in light of the two major regimes of germanic verbs, strong and weak, and finding that login-verbs do not follow the behavior of either one. Therefore, they must not be verbs. For example, “I login” in the present case does not go to “I logined” in the past but rather “I logged in”.
The author of the site argues that this reveals that it is actually just “log” that is the verb all along, and when using “login” as a verb, it should be “I log in”/”I logged in”; that login is not really a verb at all but merely sounds the same as the verb phrase “log in”. This seems reasonable.
There is also a rather derisive dismissal of the idea that “login” could be a verb which splits to “log in” when in use, and idea which the author refers to as Voltron Verbs. I am not persuaded, however, that this is as unreasonable an idea as the author thinks it is. I want to point out a feature of some verbs in german, and compare them here.
In German, some verbs can take prefixes, which can be either separable or inseparable. Wikipedia shows a full list of examples here. The gist is that a verb may take a prefix and transform in meaning. The separable prefixes are particularly interesting here, because they function almost exactly like “login”. For example, using the verb “ablegen”, to lay down:
Ich lege das Buch ab. I lay the book down Ich habe das Buch abgelegt. I have laid the book down
On the Voltron verbs page, the author comments:
This new verb type is able to split apart and reform at will, depending on the situation. The only possible name for such verbs is voltron verbs.
In Modern German, as in Anglo-Saxont, such verbs do exist. These recent login-verbs could easily be analyzed as a recreation of what is actually a very old form in the English language. Just as “ablegen” is the infinitive of “lege ab”, “login” can be the infinitive of “log in”. That doesn’t seem particularly strange to me at all.
I agree with the author’s usage recommendations. “I log in” is, to my eyes, much better than “I login”. But is login a verb? Well, maybe. I certainly don’t find the author’s arguments that it would be ridiculous prima facie to consider login a verb. At any rate, if “login” is not a verb, “log in” certainly is.
