More and more often I find grep used as a generic word. Instead of asking "how do I transform this into this", they ask "how do I grep" and expect us to understand the question and their needs. Even when grep obviously wouldn't be involved.
Am I just being churlish, or is this problem as frequent as it looks to me?
As a matter of fact in December 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary Online added draft entries for "grep" as both a noun and a verb.
Yes, grep can be used as a verb.
Yes, it is misused a fair amount. I recently read a book on epub where the author used it incorrectly. The author equated grepping with transforming. But grep is really about finding, especially finding based on a pattern.
I agree that it's difficult to help people when it's difficult to grok the lingo.
It's not that they don't grok the lingo. It's that they use it as a catch-all to fill in blank spots. They might as well be asking 'How do I computering', but try to sound smarter by shoving in grep instead.
I would only use "grep" to mean "using the grep command". I agree any other use is just a silly attempt to sound smarter.
IMO, grep was one of the first "killer apps" for UNIX. It still remains one of my favorite utilities. It's so incredibly powerful and simple at the same time.
To grep, or not to grep, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
Greppers gladly or aquire outrageous grepability,
Or take grepping, against a ocean of grepped troubles.........
;o)
I have heard it a couple of times but not as often to be considered annoying, IMO. At least people don't get as shocked as when they hear/read someone say: "Help me fsck the disk".
Is it eff sick?
Or eff ess check?
Or something else?
I sometimes grep using awk when I want to do perform some computation or transformation between the global regular expression match and the associated print. 
I have used grep as a verb for nearly 20 years; and most of my unix / linux friends do as well.
Hi.
I consider grep to do transformations, just like any other filter we can think of, even though it is almost always used to decrease the volume of data. I'd agree that it doesn't do combinations or manipulations of an individual datum. I tend to use the word in conversation only with technical friends, although occasionally others are curious enough to ask about it.
I don't think any of my friends have been confused by the use of grep as a verb.
However, I tend to not like the use of pattern ot describe a match as opposed to the template.
I'm in favor of use to encourage better communication in general.
OT and playful, need not be addressed here -- How well did we take to grok when we first encountered it? 
Can we talk about the thing we grokked to be an example of a grok:, as in what was that grok we had after the movie ? ... cheers, drl
In Dutch it one could say "even greppen" (something like "let's do a quick grep") , and also to google gets declined as a verb: "even googelen" But it gets used in the sense of trying to find something somewhere, not for transforming something into something else..
To awk, or to sed, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to grep
The shebangs and backticks of outrageous scripts,
Or to use perl against a Sea of escape chararacters.
And by appending $ end them. To bash, to kill
No more; and after sleeping 1 second, to echo
that the runaway loop is ended, and the thousand horrors
That C shell is heir to. 'Tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wished. To halt the process,
to sleep 1 second, perchance to reboot; Aye, there's the rub,
For during that fsck, what dreams may come,
When this sysadmin has shuffled off for a cup of joe,
Must give us pause.
Lol @ hanson44 brilliant 
--
The shebangs and backticks of outrageous scripts ...
Wonderful!
Good one! IMO, this is one area which makes perl less cryptic than sed!
Also, I've heard people use the word "grep" synonymously with the word "search" in the verbal context. For e.g., "grep it on google" or "grep it on users config page".
I understand the user of grep as a synonym for search. Its application seems to be widening into something far more generic however; I'm concerned that eventually it won't be "our" word anymore, the same way "hacker" was stolen by careless use.