Ever unable to help myself, I responded to an online post in which someone was carping about the use of loan as a verb. You may have been taught that loan is only a noun, lend the verb, and the Associated Press Stylebook, bless its heart, continues to prefer that distinction. But like many simple, clear distinctions, it's not so.
Even the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler said in 1926 (a century ago, mind you) that lend had supplanted loan in southern England but that the verb loan remained in use elsewhere in Britain and in the United States. Notice, pray, that he did not deny that loan was a verb in English, and he would have been foolish to say so, because it has been an English verb for better than seven centuries.
The lend/loan thing got propagated by self-appointed usage authorities after Richard Grant White invented the distinction in 1870. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that he based that distinction on etymology from Anglo-Saxon, which he got wrong owing to his inability to tell a verb from a noun in Old English. But it got into all the manuals.
The current Fowler's, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, points out that in Britain today loan as a verb is in wide use when money and objects are involved. Bryan Garner says that to loan money is fully accepted usage and to loan a thing is very nearly there. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary agrees that loan is a standard verb, stipulating only that it should be limited to literal sense, not metaphorical ones.
We have people who like to air their crotchets online (they used to write letters to newspapers), and we have editors who waste valuable time on gossamer distinctions of usage. But we have Garner, Merriam-Webster, four editions of Fowler's, MWDEU, even Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, which in 1971 found nothing much to object to with loan. There is information out there.
Even I [cough] published a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in 2020.* It includes a generous listing of bogus rules on which neither you nor anyone else should be wasting their time.
Please don't comment that I, a traitor to my craft, am destroying what little remains left of literacy in English. I've heard it all before.
*Do not publish a book amid a pandemic if you expect attention to be paid to it.
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