Transitory Transitives

[steepholm]

The ability to turn almost any part of speech into a verb is one of the glories of English, but it can be quite distracting. Take my desultory skimming of the internet this morning. Yes, they've discovered a Beowulf-style feasting hall under a village green in Kent, but I'm fixated on the phrase, "the ability to own and upkeep a horse". Yes, Mitt Romney has told porkies about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China, but I'm hung up on the image of "the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled".

Each country's euphemism for redundancy says something about its culture. In the USA, it appears, workers are "idled" - a loaded term recalling the country's Puritan roots and the kinds of hands that the Devil makes work for. Here in the UK, people are "let go" - which sounds suitably passive aggressive, almost (and especially if done to the backing of Engelbert Humperdinck) as if it were done at the employees' instigation. And in France, of course, they use a culinary metaphor: firms are dégraissé. Bon appetit.

Okay, it's a lighter-than-air theory. That's why I float it.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

So much for my national characteristics theory. I'm relieved, really.

I try to cultivate equanimity regarding new usages, though not always successfully. Of course, I would never use "myriad" as an adjective, but I'm reconciled to the fact that it is on the way to becoming one. It's the way of the world, and language is a phenomenon of the world, a creature of the flux - much as we might like it resemble the account in the Cratylus. So, I've no problem at all with "impact" - because, after all, what would you say instead? "Affect"? But that too was a noun before it was an adjective.

"Prey" is an interesting one. I'm not sure that "the gazelle is prey to the lion" is an adjectival use at all: maybe it's more like "Soldiers are cannon-fodder to generals". However, from that kind of phrase the segue into a full adjectival use is almost inevitable.

The one thing I do jib at is usages that reduce the range of available shades of meaning. Thus the tendency to use "refute" to mean "deny", or "infer" to mean "imply", both irritate me.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I think "impact" as a verb tends to be lazy (and aggravates "our sad want of signs for shades and degrees" to quote Henry James's lament [!]) -- "affect" (which is fine with me), "derail," "disturb," all depending on context.

Refute for rebut is awful in our political and critical discourse. When a newspaper tells me that Romney has refuted a charge made by Obama, and he hasn't, well that's a serious derogation of duty towards clarity and truth.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aagh! I woke in the middle of the night to the twin convictions that a) Romney was going to win by a whisker, and b) I had written "Of course, I would never use 'myriad' as an adjective", when of course I meant "as a noun". The second of these turns out to be true.

These are dark times for the Western world.