digging your birds, digging your words
Oh dear. Following some of Fussy's links today (which I do not link because whenever people start counting clicks and links and licks etc. I get very contrary and Winston Smith on everyone and refuse to play along) I noticed that apparently "trend" has become a verb. A transitive verb.
I know. Sigh.
"Trend," I think, has been an intransitive verb for awhile now, as in "this line trends upwards after the Second Continental Congress." Even that usage seems a little new-y and unnecessary, as you could just as easily say "the trend of this line is upward," or "there is an upward trend here." But gah, the site says "trend this." Trend this. What does that even mean? What is action verb "to trend" trying to communicate?
On the most recent Prarie Home Companion, there was a sketch about a woman who can't accept a marriage proposal from a man who uses "gift" as a verb. And for all my training in linguistics and learning to respect the natural shift of language over time and language as common property and rules of language as descriptive rather than prescriptive, I still cannot freaking stand to hear "gift" used as a verb. Perhaps it's because why take a noun to make a verb when there is a perfectly good verb that means exactly what the new noun-to-verb formulation means and when between the noun and verb there is the utterly TINY difference of a voiced or unvoiced fricative plus, if you're using it in past tense, an irregular form that is actually shorter than the freaking new construction?! I would also hazard a guess that the word, genealogically speaking, started as a verb in the first place and actually spawned the noun, although I haven't looked it up.
The shift of all language is toward regularity, I know, I know. I know. It's just irksome.
Perhaps the appeal of saying "I'm gifting her this" over "I'm giving her this" is the difference in the accompanying mental image of handing someone a nice big, festively-colored box with a big old bow versus the image of handing someone a stapler. Maybe "giving" is just too general for us now.
I know. Sigh.
"Trend," I think, has been an intransitive verb for awhile now, as in "this line trends upwards after the Second Continental Congress." Even that usage seems a little new-y and unnecessary, as you could just as easily say "the trend of this line is upward," or "there is an upward trend here." But gah, the site says "trend this." Trend this. What does that even mean? What is action verb "to trend" trying to communicate?
On the most recent Prarie Home Companion, there was a sketch about a woman who can't accept a marriage proposal from a man who uses "gift" as a verb. And for all my training in linguistics and learning to respect the natural shift of language over time and language as common property and rules of language as descriptive rather than prescriptive, I still cannot freaking stand to hear "gift" used as a verb. Perhaps it's because why take a noun to make a verb when there is a perfectly good verb that means exactly what the new noun-to-verb formulation means and when between the noun and verb there is the utterly TINY difference of a voiced or unvoiced fricative plus, if you're using it in past tense, an irregular form that is actually shorter than the freaking new construction?! I would also hazard a guess that the word, genealogically speaking, started as a verb in the first place and actually spawned the noun, although I haven't looked it up.
The shift of all language is toward regularity, I know, I know. I know. It's just irksome.
Perhaps the appeal of saying "I'm gifting her this" over "I'm giving her this" is the difference in the accompanying mental image of handing someone a nice big, festively-colored box with a big old bow versus the image of handing someone a stapler. Maybe "giving" is just too general for us now.
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