A grammarian’s Christmas gift

Professor Grammar will provide my column this week. Because it’s Christmastime, it concerns the proper use of the word “gift.”

In the past couple of years, gift has increasingly been used as a verb in addition to its traditional noun form. As in, “I gifted my friend two tickets to the concert.” It sounds better and is more efficient to say “I gave my friend two tickets to the concert.” But for some reason, that’s no longer sophisticated enough. To me, hearing someone use gift as a verb sounds like scraping fingernails across a blackboard.

I’ve always thought of gift as a noun. For more than seven decades it has been a noun to me. I even checked with my trusty Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which I keep on my desktop, and it confirms my belief. At least, that was the case in 1966, when this edition was published. But when I doublechecked with the dictionary app in my computer, I’ll be darned if it isn’t now acceptable to use gift as a verb. But there are a lot of things on apps that are goofy.

Using gift as a verb must have started with some advertising agency, because I first noticed it on TV ads.

Life is spinning out of control. We’ve elected a felon as our next president and nouns become verbs.

New words are devised every day to describe things that didn’t exist a year or even a day ago. Language is a living thing, always growing and changing. If it wasn’t, we’d all be speaking Latin, which has been considered a dead language for more than 1,000 years (although it was still taught in nearly every high school in the United States until the 1960s). Out of use since the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin is still the basis for most of English and western European languages, and scientific and legal work depend on Latin words.

Actually, there are quite a few English words — hundreds, in fact — that serve as both nouns and verbs. Some even do quadruple duty as adverbs and adjectives. Here are a few out of several dozen: back, bitter, clean, close, down, light, plumb, pop, prompt, rough, well.

There are a lot of other words that I think are misused, but there’s not enough room in my column to get into them. So I guess I will have to accept gift as both a noun and verb and get on with my life. But I can’t.

But I can gift you this column as my Christmas gift to you. Cheers!