It’s pretty common in English to use a word in a different way than its “part of speech” suggests. That is, using a verb as a noun, or a noun as a verb, etc. We can get away with this and still be understood because English sentences generally provide plenty of contextual clues so you can figure out what the speaker meant even if you think they’re functionally illiterate (if you tend to be a stickler) or, if you’re more lenient, if they’re just being, um, “linguistically flexible.”
Using a word separately from its expected part of speech is called “anthimeria”, and it’s been going on for centuries. Shakespeare did it constantly, and it’s so common in modern informal usage that it’s almost a rule rather than an exception. That’s where we get phrases like “my bad”, “weird out”, and “dumb down”. But anthimeria has really found a home in the corporate world, where the impetus often seems to be misguided, pompous attempts to sound more authoritative. Corporate anthimeria is characteristically artless and clumsy; it’s easy to find awkward anthimeric phrases like “leverage our core competencies” or “impact the bottom line.”
Some aspects of corporate anthimeria seem like they’re driven by individual words, which seem to come and go in a fad-like pattern. “Leverage” (“I’ll leverage this pen to make a note”), “ask” (“what is the ask”), “incent” (“I’m incensed by their attempt to incent me with bagels”), and “impact” (“we need to find out how that competition will impact our sales”) are all current right now, but will likely be replaced before long.
There’s one twist involved with corporate anthimeria, though, that’s borderline hilarious, and that’s when a trademark becomes so well known (which is considered a good thing) that it starts to be used as part of common speech, sometimes anthimerically (which is considered a bad thing). An old example is “xeroxing a document,” and a newer one is “google it.” Trademarks also sometimes enter the language but stay nouns, of course — after all, that’s where we got aspirin and heroin!
