Verbing Ourselves

It's official, or as official as an esteemed publication can make it. James Wood, for The New Yorker, applies everything he learned at Harvard to write the following sentence:

So here is Alter's inspired attempt to English the Hebrew:

What he's talking about is a new translation (as compared to the King James Version) of the Book of Psalms. Considering how much we bastardize our own language every day (and I'm a creative writer, so I know something about fucking one's own prose), it should be no surprise that we've now officially verbed it -- "to English" -- which is admittedly no worse than "to verb" something in the first place.