"Resource" as a verb

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About a month ago I was getting ready to come into work one morning while watching CNN. The news channel was broadcasting a speech by President Obama in which he was outlining a new strategy for our efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A little over halfway through, I heard him use the word "resource" in a very interesting way. Here's a snippet from the transcript:

For three years, our commanders have been clear about the resources they need for training. And those resources have been denied because of the war in Iraq. Now, that will change.... And later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces. For the first time, this will truly resource our effort to train and support the Afghan army and police.
His first couple of uses of the word "resource" are just what I'd expect--using the word as a noun (which, I had assumed, was the only acceptable form for this word). However, that last use (in bold) has the word functioning as a verb, something I hadn't thought acceptable (or at least not a way I had ever heard the word used). So off to the OED I go in hopes of substantiating my view, only to find that the word has, in fact, been used as a verb (you have to scroll down to the bottom of the entry to see that). It's apparently been used more often as a participle (i.e., resourcing or resourced) but, nonetheless, there is precedent for the President using it as a verb.

What do you think? Have you heard this usage of resource before? What other words have you heard/read taking on unusual forms?

If we don't call it "toxic"...

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So according to this press release from the Treasury, the billions of dollars in bad mortgage loans that banks have on their books now (which have contributed largely to the current economic downturn) will no longer be referred to as "toxic" assets. Instead, the government refers to them as "legacy" assets--a term that is obviously meant to make them more appealing to potential investors (as if the government providing essentially "free" capital to investors isn't enough--but I'll refrain from getting on my soapbox here).


Looking through the OED's entry for "legacy" encourages some interesting connections with this word and the bad debt it's being used to describe:
  • "Legacy" is sometimes used to refer to the tangible (like money or property) or the intangible things (like a name or reputation) given in a will, bequeathed to a descendant. That sound nice, right? I think this sense of the word as a positive connotation for most of us (who wouldn't want to inherit lots of money from a rich old aunt and become independently wealthy, right?). But if you look at this "legacy" in a political sense, you might take a cynical perspective and consider the legacy of billions (if not trillions) of dollars in debt. What will our future descendants have to do to cover these debts that our society is accumulating right now?
  • "Legacy" is also used to refer to software or hardware "which, although outdated or limiting, is an integral part of a computer system and difficult to replace." These bad mortgages are certainly still an integral part of our economic system and are not going to be easy to pawn off on other investors (thus the role of the government in fronting a lot of the money for investors to entice them to take these bad assets out of banks' hands).
It's also interesting to note that the OED doesn't even list "legacy" with an adjective form, such as it's used here by the Treasury. Once again, behold the beauty of the English language with its propensity for verbs and nouns that can easily shift identities!

I'd love to hear some other examples of people or institutions who rename something unpleasant in order to make it more appealing.

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