[Richard Meyer]

Well said, Andrew. I had the same reaction, but decided to stick to one other point in my previous post. Conservative! One may as well say that Beethoven was conservative in his musical composition and van Gogh in his painting.

[Seree Zohar]

O wordnerd
aaarrghghgh dont things like this make one feel 'historical'? ... proactive promotion of to gift resurged in a wave of words like....proactive! [because active isnt active enough; and it's opposite must therefore logically be conpassive, or perhaps propassive? havent quite decided yet...], and impact [v., to replace influence (v) rather than refer to teeth] and diarize, and like/unlike // friend/unfriend. Truth is, I have no probs with gift as a verb, in that it IS a very very close cuzn of 'give'; but with greater specificity [as Chris Childers has noted]: and also featured in my very British schooling. Dont your kids toss stuff like that at you in Swedish too? I just learned a new one in Hebrew recently, of the 'diarize' variety: left me floored for a bit! Then led to the aaaarghghgh reaction.

and, segueing right along: I love this part of your post, Richard: In Elizabethan English you could happy your friend, which gives easy legitimacy to unfriend and all the rest. Who 'owns' a language? It's users, of course. Doesn't anyone have as much right as anyone else to coin words or meanings and try to successfully get them into common usage? Why do we feel we must keep our thinking inside the box?

so, now that I've footprinted yr thread, bfn. Have a good w/e.

[Gregory Dowling]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

But why, I ask myself, (getting back on track), don't I like it? Apart from small-minded curmudgeonry? I think it is because "I've gifted something to someone", smacks of "bestowing" and in some curious way (in my small mind) draws attention to the giver in a rather self-aggrandizing and ungracious way.

Nicely put, Janice. But you therefore do acknowledge the fact that the verb "gift" conveys something that the verb "give" by itself does not. That helps to explain why it's been invented - as do the examples Chris has given us (given, rather than gifted, in this case, I would say).

And I reiterate the point that using nouns as verbs is a constant in the English language. Another nice example from Shakespeare, from Antony and Cleopatra (and certainly not from prose or from a "low" character):

Those hearts that spanielled me at heels...

[Janice D. Soderling]

Nicely put, Janice. But you therefore do acknowledge the fact that the verb "gift" conveys something that the verb "give" by itself does not.

True, but note bene, I will not waver from the sense "bestow on " or "grant". I refuse to use it as just plain "give", as a book or birthday present.

But it was a useful thread, no? Here we can rid of our pent-up Yuletide frustrations and indigestion and trains running late and too much snow or not enough and stoopid refereees and having been gifted with the wrong and completely idiotic gifts or our giftees not appreciating the gifts they were gifted with and for which we had to stand in line a long time.

Even Christmas haters and disbelievers can find the thread useful.

[Ann Drysdale]

As poets, we "tinker" similes for a living and one excellent way to test them is do as as a tinker does with a pot - turn it upside down to see if it holds water. I tried doing the same with this question, with limited success.

I have only once resorted to having a t-shirt designed and printed to my specification. The legend thereon read: Sod the whale - save the gerund. A gerund being, in my opinon, a lovely grammatical device which is truly endangered. Set a-going with a well-placed apostrophe, it hones the meaning of the sentence it adorns. The difference between "John running caused the bridge to collapse", as against "John's running caused the bridge to collapse". Clearly a grammatical swordstroke for truth. In short - a verbal noun.

So why do I, who would defend to the death the beautiful verbal noun, feel uncomfortable with the increasing ubiquity of the nounal verb? I flinch and tut - does this make me a Bad Nerd?

[Janice D. Soderling]

I flinch and tut - does this make me a Bad Nerd?

In my book, it makes you an exceptionally gifted Nerd.

But zounds, there are no bad Nerds, because a Word Nerd, per definition, cares passionately, even compassionately at times, about the ozone holes forming in our language, the endangered apostrophes and the acid rain of careless usage.

A Nerd, however, is not, per definition, a conservative, but a caretaker, a steward. A Word Nerd is alert to clever inventiveness as well as conservation, and like the fabled boy scout of old is always ready to assist the frailer users across the potholed street. Even, if need be, make them cross it when they don't want to.

[David Landrum]

I started hearing people use "gifted" at the college where I used to teach--referring to donors who "gifted" something to the school. It clashed in my ears, but "verbing" words does have an old history, as David D. points out. Another Shakespeare example: In the old morality plays, Herod, king of Israel, was depicted as a loud-mouth buffoon. Hamlet says of the speech of bad actors, "It out-Herods Herod."

dwl

[W.F. Lantry]

Andrew, Richard, Gregory,

Thanks for your comments. I'm a little surprised that my notes were considered at all controversial, as the argument is far from original with me, and can be traced back at least a hundred years (well, 98 to be exact, but I'm pretty sure the ideas were floating around before then.

The argument could be subdivided into three sections: Matter, Manner, and audience. Or perhaps theme, language, and attendance...

On matter: quick, what do Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio have in common? They all snagged most of their stories from other, older texts. This may not seem like a 'conservative' practice in some senses of the word, but it would be hard to call it 'revolutionary' or inventive, without invoking some kind of special pleading. One may as well say Ovid was inventive! Now, there's an untenable position...

On manner, which seems the heart of the issue, I simply lean on Pound:

"I am constantly contending that it took two centuries of Provence and one of Tuscany to develop the media of Dante's masterwork, that it took the latinists of the Renaissance, Pleiade, and his own age of painted speech to prepare Shakespeare his tools."

I do strongly agree with both of these claims, and their underlying assumption: that language is a cultural product, that we don't make it up in our heads, that writers are, for the most part, not inventive: that they are simply really good listeners, who consider carefully what they hear, and make good selections from the materials available to them. I do agree we tend to focus on individuals when we study inventive language, but we shouldn't forget that's simply a convenient trope, that their names are ciphers for changes that go well beyond their work.

Audience is also an interesting aspect of this, and I would argue that the audiences for all four have always been fairly conservative, but perhaps that's a discussion for another day. Still, their identities do reflect on any discussion of language choices...

Thanks,

Bill

[Richard Meyer]

Bill:

Well of course no one is born in a vacuum. It goes without saying that Shakespeare was born in England, that he inherited his mother tongue, that he followed the established genre of writing plays in blank verse, that he snatched plots wherever he could, that he this and he that and …

So, what's your point? Not much of one as far as I can see. What you've been saying is not all that controversial; it's just trivial, in my opinion. I find it curious in this discussion that when a particular point about the original or creative language usage of a great writer has arisen and someone supplies specifics that contradict some attitude of yours, you just ignore the point. Borrowing a plot has nothing to do with telling or retelling the story by using language in a new or superlative way. Good writing, as Alexander Pope tells us, is "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."

Your attitude toward Shakespeare makes me wonder if you've read his contemporaries, looked at his writing next to theirs. And it was later admirers, not Dante himself, who added the word Divine to his Comedy. Apparently no one at the time had enlightened them with your view that focusing on exceptional individual creativity and talent when studying literature is simply a convenient trope.

Your seemingly dismissive attitude toward individual writers of genius and their contributions reminds me of that old absurdity: give a monkey a typewriter and enough time to plunk away at the keys and in a few millennia he'll turn out Hamlet by sheer chance.

Richard

[Jan D. Hodge]

"Another nice example from Shakespeare, from Antony and Cleopatra (and certainly not from prose or from a "low" character): 'Those hearts that spanielled me at heels...' "

My favorite, from the same play: "I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' th' posture of a whore."

And here are a few of many penned by a poet much admired among Sphereans:

"the moon sheets wall and tree"

"it smalled and died away"
"he darked my cottage door"********both adjectives as noun

"my clothing clams me"

"I was scarce of mood to comrade her"

"whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill"

"mirrors meant to glass the opulent"

"beings who fellowed with myself"

"one who shrined all that was best of womankind"

"foreign constellations west each night"


For those who neither recognize nor guess the poet, it is Thomas Hardy.