[Andrew Frisardi]

Bill, I doubt that anyone is going to disagree that even the greatest poets work with the language and culture they inherit, like everyone else. I wouldn’t use the word “conservative” for what they do with it, though. Your use of that word here levels it out to mean nothing in particular, since by those lights everyone is conservative, like everyone has a body and breathes the air and walks the earth that happens to be available. Your approach is one-size-fits-all. I agree with Richard that most of your last post is a series of truisms cited to support a “school of resentment” (in Bloom’s phrase) approach to great literature. Leveling things off can be so comforting. Ovid inventive? Nope, just a cipher. Dante or Shakespeare uncannily creative? Nah, they just “made good selections from the materials available to them.”

[Janice D. Soderling]

Jan, thanks for these excellent examples. I admire them all and certainly Hardy knows what he is doing.

My objection was never sweeping. I have used "soapboxed" and other such constructions myself.

These examples strengthen me in my belief that the reason I don't like it is that it "spotlights" the giver's having given. I doubt that was the intention of the writer in the article where I found it.

And it may be more complicated than I can figure out.

Thanks for these examples, Jan, and all best for 2011.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I have some further thoughts on this after a cup of strong java.

It’s all well and good to point to earlier usages, but that essentially tells us nothing. The question is: “What happens to our perception of a noun, when it is made into a verb.

I think it subverts the original meaning in a sly way and implants a special force (at least until we grow used to it and it becomes commonplace as in “He dogged her every footstep”, which is much more ho-hum to the modern ear than “'Those hearts that spanielled me at heels...' ") One might speculate that it was inventive also in Bill Shakey’s day, because “dogged”, I’m sure, has been with us longer. Moreover, “spanielled” is more specific than “dogged” and this also gives it a special thrust.

It may be an after-construction in my mind, but I don’t think I would have reacted if I had seen “gifted” used in either of these two ways.

Though she was only fifteen when he gifted her with pearls and diamonds, she was no fool.

or

She gifted him with two thoroughbreds and soon after common gossip had him as her new fancy man.

In each of the above the word becomes a little malicious, though the usage echoes an everyday construction “he/she showered gifts on her/him.”. “Showered” itself is a noun made verb, but one that has grown mundane and thus has no or little effect.

My made-up examples above ring differently (to my ear) than, After a long and arduous journey, the Magi found the infant and gifted him with gold, frankincense and myrrh which deflects the idea of no-strings-attached veneration.

It’s a lovely thread though, with all its sidesteps and meanderings of bright minds.

[Andrew Frisardi]

In addition to making verbs out of substantives--of which there are so many fine examples in this thread--Dante does it with adverbs. He does this in the Paradiso as part of his project to create a language for the ineffable--the basic paradox of which (using language for that which is inexpressible) is one of the main themes of that canticle of the DC. It is why the language in it, which is one of the wonders of the world, is constantly morphing and springing and mutating from itself.

An example is from the end of canto X, when the twelve scholar-saints start ecstatically dancing in a circle like the Whirling Dervishes. The verb at the end, s’insempra, takes the adverb sempre, always, and adds the in- to it to form a verb.

così vid'io la gloriosa rota
muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra,
e in dolcezza ch'esser non pò nota

se non colà dove gioir s'insempra.

which literally reads:

thus I saw the glorious wheel
move and render voice to voice in harmony,
and with a sweetness that cannot be grasped

but there where joy alwayses-itself [i.e., makes itself everlasting, self-perpetuates].

(Is this a translator’s nightmare? Hell, yeah.)

[Petra Norr]

Bill Bryson has an eye-opening account of Shakespeare's inventive use of language in his book, Shakespeare:

Quote: "He coined -- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of -- 2,035 words...
"Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary. excellent, eventful. barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless)."

Bryson also says: "Not everyone appreciated this creative impulse. When Robert Greene [a contemporary of Shakespeare] referred to him as 'beautified by our feathers', he was mocking a Shakespeare neologism in beautified."

Together with "beautified" and the other words mentioned above, some of our "un-" words made their first appearance in Shakespeare's writings, including unmask, unhand, unlock, untie and unveil..

As Bryson says, some of Shakespeare's words never caught on, such as undeaf, untent, exsufflicate, bepray and insultment. But about 800 of his words are still used today.

Bryson goes on to say that Shakespeare's real gift was as a phrasemaker. Among the phases well known today that were apparently first coined by him are vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, bag and baggage, be in a pickle, the milk of human kindness, blinking idiot, with bated breath, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion, and many others.
----
Quotes and paraphrases from p. 112-114 in Bill Bryson's Shakespeare.

[Allen Tice]

Mousing here and eyeballing what had been authored between mousings, I happied me. Like, it was like, like Shaxpere had playwrighted again. Truthiness is: I did, as waitpersons in U.S. say now before walking quickly away, "enjoy...?"

Yo, what gift the gifter gie us (giftees), to forget oursel'es as others forgift us.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

I'm with Chris here. If the verb "to gift" is here to stay then it is no doubt because it can do things that "to give" can't. If two words are identical in meaning, one will fall out of use.

That it can take some getting used to is something else. And for most of us the older we get the less inclined we are to appreciate the introduction of new words which we didn't know we needed. Words reassure us with their relative permanence, and when we find they have been adapted it feels like a betrayal.

Duncan

[John Whitworth]

In one of the Molesworth books there is a Searle drawing of a gerund ignoring a gerundive, though I'm not sure if I've got the verb right. Anyway it shows both gerund and gerundive to be curious creatures.

I came upon a gerund.
He was busy on an errand
And it scarcely had the time to say, 'Gor blimey!'

'By the solemn skies above me
When I find a girl to love me
she turns out to be a versifying limey!'

'When I want to give my undiv-
ided love to a gerundive,
Why should Venus send me poets thus to try me?'

Finish the rhyme, Ann, or anyone else.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

If two words are identical in meaning, one will fall out of use.

Huh? Don't many words in the language have long lists of synonyms? Among the synonyms for a particular word, some will have the same or nearly the same meaning, while others will carry significant or subtle differences, either denotatively or connotatively. And it would be a specious argument to say that no two synonymous words are really identical in meaning, for then logic would seem to dictate that no two words exist or could ever exist that mean the same thing, which makes the above quoted statement rather absurd.

Richard

[Roger Slater]

Duncan, that's very bad news for Roget. Like Richard, I neither concur nor agree.