To Gift Or Not To Gift

T

tim840

Registered Senior Member
Apparently people are now using the word "gift" as a verb... Or so I've read. Anyone heard this in practice? And why are people doing this? I think it sounds stupid.
 
Maybe they're all turning into hackers.
It's a common tenet for old-school hackers: all nouns can be verbed, all verbs can be nouned.
But at least we knew why it was funny.:shrug:
 
Along similar lines (gift -> party ->)
Invite is now a noun as well as a verb.
Aargh!
 
just using the word "gift" as a verb. as in, " He gifted her a book" or something like that.
 
tim840 said:
just using the word "gift" as a verb. as in, " He gifted her a book" or something like that.
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No, you're using it wrong, and that makes it look silly. The verb "to gift" is not equivalent to the verb "to give." It means "to give gifts to." The proper use is, "I need to go shopping because there are two weddings coming up in the family and that's a lot of people to gift."

The dictionaries indicate that gift has always been usable as a verb. That makes sense, since we've always had the past participle in the construction, "She is a gifted musician," meaning, "Nature gifted her with talent."
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
No, you're using it wrong, and that makes it look silly. The verb "to gift" is not equivalent to the verb "to give."
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Unfortunately it's going more or less that way now.
I have, a number of times, seen "I gifted her an X" meaning that X was sent as a gift.
 
The worst example of this kind of thing I've heard lately was during the Olympics.

Broadcasters have started using "medal" as a verb to mean "win a medal", as in "He medalled in the 50 metre backstroke."

Yuk!
 
James R said:
The worst example of this kind of thing I've heard lately was during the Olympics.

Broadcasters have started using "medal" as a verb to mean "win a medal", as in "He medalled in the 50 metre backstroke."

Yuk!
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But this sort of thing has been going on, well, forever. We make new words, we make new forms using words from different categories. Languages change. The language you got used to and think is 'right' contained 'offensive' new uses that previous generations were no doubt just as uptight about.

Let's party.

Shit that's really a noun.
 
James R said:
The worst example of this kind of thing I've heard lately was during the Olympics. Broadcasters have started using "medal" as a verb to mean "win a medal", as in "He medalled in the 50 metre backstroke." Yuk!
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That's just making the language more compact and efficient. There's nothing wrong with eliminating two syllables that add no meaning to your sentence. That's a positive force in the evolution of language. Perhaps some day English will be as economical as Chinese, which, on the average in my own informal study, takes seven syllables to translate ten in English.

Of course English and French are both very compact compared to the typical European language. The syllable count in Spanish and Italian is so high that they have to be spoken at machine-gun speed, which makes them difficult for foreigners and students to parse the sentences and pick out the words we know.

Of course this is not the same phenomenon as replacing "give" with "gift," which has no phonetic advantage. And turning "suspicion" into a verb 25 years ago was downright stupid, since "suspect" is shorter. I haven't heard that one in a long time.

We turn nouns into verbs in English all the time. We "motor" down the highway, "seed" our lawns, "dog" people to make sure they do their jobs right, "water" our gardens and "baby" our pets.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
That's just making the language more compact and efficient. There's nothing wrong with eliminating two syllables that add no meaning to your sentence. That's a positive force in the evolution of language. Perhaps some day English will be as economical as Chinese, which, on the average in my own informal study, takes seven syllables to translate ten in English.

Of course English and French are both very compact compared to the typical European language. The syllable count in Spanish and Italian is so high that they have to be spoken at machine-gun speed, which makes them difficult for foreigners and students to parse the sentences and pick out the words we know.
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But people still speak Chinese super-fast. At least it seems like it to me...
 
tim840 said:
But people still speak Chinese super-fast. At least it seems like it to me...
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No they don't, it just sounds that way because it's so strange and so foreign, and also because the exaggerated tonality is distracting. Count the syllables. Or just get into the cadence and then imagine Spanish or Japanese being spoken that slowly. I can always pick out the words I know from spoken Mandarin. I have a far greater knowledge of Spanish, yet people often lose me in their dialog.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
That's just making the language more compact and efficient. There's nothing wrong with eliminating two syllables that add no meaning to your sentence. That's a positive force in the evolution of language. Perhaps some day English will be as economical as Chinese, which, on the average in my own informal study, takes seven syllables to translate ten in English.

Of course English and French are both very compact compared to the typical European language. The syllable count in Spanish and Italian is so high that they have to be spoken at machine-gun speed, which makes them difficult for foreigners and students to parse the sentences and pick out the words we know.

Of course this is not the same phenomenon as replacing "give" with "gift," which has no phonetic advantage. And turning "suspicion" into a verb 25 years ago was downright stupid, since "suspect" is shorter. I haven't heard that one in a long time.

We turn nouns into verbs in English all the time. We "motor" down the highway, "seed" our lawns, "dog" people to make sure they do their jobs right, "water" our gardens and "baby" our pets.
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Perhaps as a linguist you don't assign much value to locutio.
 
Yeah, that kind of thing totally weirds the language.

Seriously though, if you think about it there are already a VAST number of cases where the noun and the verb are the same in English. Lecture, cut, store, feed, burn...
 
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Fraggle Rocker said:
I assume you meant to write "locution," but I don't understand what you meant by it. Locution is the style of speech of an individual or a group, not a community or an entire nation.
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Perhaps, locutio is what I know from latin. It's ancient meaning referred to 'speech decoration' rather than local dialect. It used to be an intentional practice of decor.
 
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