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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I never clicked into this when I originally saw it because I'm not that interested in a "technical analysis", but gained interest when the other title said that the app was hacked. To me, that's worth discussing, but here that lede is a bit buried. And I now only know about it because a friend sent me the link.

I do feel there's a pattern of me reading some interesting tech news, then thinking "wait, why didn't I see this discussed on HN?", to searching for it and finding a buried/flagged HN discussion due to it being somewhat tied to politics (what isn't?)

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I have recently switched to the “active threads” feed which shows flagged content: https://news.ycombinator.com/active

As a non-native English understander, I find it funny that discussions related to politics are “flagged”. I.e. carrying a flag.

Or "had a flag waved at them", like football assistant referees or F1 peoples.

Or “called them over by raising a hand” with “flagged down”.

Someone carrying a flag is flagging.

Someone who had a flag applied to them was flagged.

Noun to verb conjugations are unofficial English. But we love verbing our words. Google has been verbed into Googling. And when someone is the target of Google we call that getting Googled.

It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English. So don't sweat it. It's how our slang evolves. Apologies for the lack of consistency in our language!

> It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English.

Hm? Where'd you get that impression?

It's certainly unofficial -- English has no official governing body, so essentially _all_ English is unofficial. However, zero-derived denominal verbs are quite common in even formal written English [0], are well studied [1], and aren't at all limited to American English [2].

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[0] As seen in this very thread.

[1] It took me almost no time to find a random academic paper [1a] and two Wikipedia articles [1b][1c].

[1a] https://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/HarleyDenominalV...

[1b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denominal_verb

[1c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/the-pedant-noun...

I also read it as carrying a flag (applied by others) to highlight that it needs to be reviewed or hidden.

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