密歇根新闻广播 thunderstorm如何解（在线收听）

Few things can shut down an outdoor swimming pool faster than a good old-fashioned summer thunderstorm.

English professor Anne Curzan is a longtime swimmer who swims in a master's program. Recently, one of her coaches emailed another swimmer about holding practice at an outdoor pool, as long as it wasn't thunderstorming.

The email program's spellchecker did not care for that and branded "thunderstorming" with a scarlet underline. But why? We take all kinds of nouns and turn them into verbs. Why not thunderstorm?

Thunderstorm as a noun goes back to the 1600s. The verb, however, seems to be quite new. Curzan couldn't find it in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, or the Oxford English Dictionary.

The oldest example Curzan has found so far comes from a 1972 linguistics book by James McCawley. In it, McCawley writes, We can say A thunderstorm began, but not so naturally, It is thunderstorming.

In other words, he doesn't think thunderstorm makes a great verb.

McCawley goes on to argue that general terms like rain and storm tend to be the type of nouns that become verbs. He gives the example, The thunderstorm began to rain down on us. Here, rain becomes the verb and thunderstorm remains the noun.

However, there are plenty of examples of people happily using the verb form, such as this 1991 example: The skies had gotten black and it was thunderstorming.

To thunderstorm may be more specific than to rain or to storm, but at some point, we as speakers decided it was an okay verb. Do you use thunderstorm this way?