Wha- What, now?

This may be the dumbest argument yet against "verbing nouns".

A bit of context. Over at Bad Astronomy Phil Plait wonders if he can use "mass" as a verb, as in "this star masses a gazillion kg". Many of his commenters hate it. (A few actually know it's fine; a very few know it's in the OED as a verb as well as a noun.) Those that hate it have various 'reasons', including that it's "an abomination" or "jargon". But this guy has probably the dumbest 'argument' ever (my italics):

Count another professional astronomer voting “Nay”. I personally don’t use mass as a verb (then again, I don’t like to verb impact either [ahem]), though I have heard some astronomers (both pro and am) use it that way. But definitely not “all the time.” Maybe I am just old-fashioned, but I submit that a satisfactory substitute to “the star masses a whopping gazillion kg” is “the mass of the star is a whopping gazillion kg”. The word “masses” is too useful as a plural to allow it to be hijacked for a verb (”the masses of the asteroids add up to a piddly fraction of the mass of the Sun”).

Yeah.

He thinks that if "masses" is a verb, it can't be a noun, too.

I hesitate to ask him what he thinks of a word like "banks"... I mean, a sentence like "John banks in three banks" must just drive him up the wall (without adding "one of which is on the banks of the Suwanee").