Words and usages in English go in and out of fashion. When a new expression, or a repurposed old one, emerges, the eager adapters jump on it, because it's all the rage, and the traditionalists scorn it, because all is rage.
I've mentioned elsewhere that contact as a verb was widely deplored as a vulgarism in the 1940s and 1950s (" 'Contact" is not a verb in this house," Nero Wolfe tells Archie Goodwin). But as the means of getting in contact multiplied, the objection faded. The objection to hopefully as a sentence adverb meaning "it is hoped that" from the 1970s and 1980s has also been wearing away, having had little foundation to start with beyond disliking "the way those people talk."
Thirty years ago, John S. Carroll as editor of The Sun had strong traditionalist views about language, and he deplored using host as a verb. So I dutifully added the prohibition to our house stylebook, and the copy desk dutifully changed every host as verb to play host to. In time John Carroll and the language moved on, and at The Sun we hosted without trepidation. With good reason. The current sense of hosting events carries a sense of sponsorship, often of large-scale events, by organizations, something beyond the traditional sense of receiving guests and entertaining socially. And play host to as a substitute is stilted.
Thirty years ago, The Sun also had a prohibition in its stylebook damning the use of suck to mean "objectionable or inadequate" as "vulgar street language." The reason, when younger reporters asked for an explanation, was that the word suggested fellation, and their reaction was "Oh come on." (Merriam-Webster still calls it "slang, sometimes vulgar.")
We also upheld the pupil/student distinction but dropped it as educators increasingly came to see younger children as active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients of information. The Associated Press Stylebook has eliminated all vestiges of the traditional distinction. We also got the occasional letter from a reader objecting to our referring to children as kids ("Kids are goats"), but that is another item that the AP Stylebook has quietly heaved over the side.
Language, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our cavils away.
Ah, peeves of times past! As a collector of obsolete usage manuals, I particularly appreciate the ones that are simply inscrutable today: the denial that "reliable" is, or can possibly be, a word; the claim that "The house is being built" is ungrammatical, and so on. My impression is that the student/pupil distinction probably falls in this category today.
ReplyDeleteAs for complaining about contact or host being used as verbs, whenever I see a complaint about a noun being verbed or a verb being nouned, I honestly wonder if the complainer has ever opened a dictionary and looked closely at what is there. This is how English works, and has worked for many centuries.
Or perhaps that is not the point. Peevers have a strong Madonna-or-whore approach to English, putting on a pedestal an imaginary English that does not and never has existed in real life, while despising the real article.
Well, it might be sexual in metaphor ("madonna-or-whore"), but I suspect it's more likely to be racial ("you sound like you're not educated", meaning you sound like the Poor, who are not educated, and who are incidentally Black).
ReplyDeleteOr a juggernaut...
ReplyDeleteAnyone care to predict how long it will take for "favorite" to enter common usage as a verb? As someone who occupies the fast-shrinking preservationist island I'll not help the process.
ReplyDeleteAnd here's Auden, in 1896, anticipating facebook's verbing of "friend":
ReplyDelete'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.