Using "gifted" as a verb [duplicate]
I have always argued adamantly, as long as the issue has been around, that gift should never be used as a verb. However, someone whose English knowledge I quite respect disagrees.
I’ve done some searching and I haven’t found a consensus; should gifting be shunned?
I don't know where you got the idea that gift should never be used as a verb.
Oxford Living Dictionaries
Give (something) as a gift, especially formally or as a donation or bequest.
Merriam-Webster
- to endow with some power, quality, or attribute
- a: to make a gift of; b: present.
Neither is this a recent innovation. The OED attests to gift as a verb since the 16th century:
The friendes that were together met [He] gyfted them richely with right good speede.
Some more recent examples include
They appear at banquets, and Richard takes pleasure in gifting them with luminous silks and rare Eastern jewels. (1931, The Crusades by Harold Lamb, via COHA)
I wondered, when the hon. and gallant Member for Argyll (Major McCallum) was speaking, whether the estate which has been gifted to Scotland to which he referred will become part of the Crown lands. (1943, House of Commons speech by Campbell Stephen, via Hansard)
In addition to potlatching, which is a system of exchange between communities in a social context often typified by competitive gifting, there was a considerable amount of outright sale and trade beyond the local community and sometimes over great distances. (1979, Washington v. Fishing Vessel Assn. 443 U.S. 658
Penman was gifted with a Grub Street membership card at a time when Grub Street had been decommissioned. (London Review of Books, 1998)
Our man watched the proceedings from 500 miles away in Scotland, but the gallery at Royal St. George's probably heard his groans as Bjorn took three shots to get out of that wee bunker on the 16th, gifting the Claret Jug to Ben Curtis and costing Hannan a touch over 5,000. (2004 Golf Magazine via COCA)
When the college gifted them the cottage, Eleanor was immediately struck by the difference between this shrunken dwelling and the other homes of Jericho. (2009 *New York Times)
Actress Mae Whitman, whose Arrested Development role as unimpressive Ann Veal has essentially gifted her with pop-cultural ownership of the word "her" ("...her?"), has bestowed her endorsement on Jonze's film. (2013 The Atlantic)
Just then, on Christmas of 2001, his sister-in-law gifted him a copy of Edmund Morris’s “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.” (2016 The New Yorker)
While Etihad’s annual report trumpeted the 5m passengers and $1.4bn revenue that its equity partners gifted it in 2015, the associated losses were brushed aside. (2017 The Economist)
Glasgow's Riverside Museum has been gifted a Tesla to showcase alongside its alternative fuel vehicles. (2018 BBC News)
The adjective gifted is traced to the past participle of the verb gift, from 1644 onwards.
Gift can indeed be used as a verb to mean give someone a gift. However it is not so commonly used this way as can be seen from the fact that this is not listed in smaller dictionaries.
Certainly. It's been used as such for some 500 years.
I think the question to be asked with all backformed verbs — fragmentate, benefact, gift, etc. — is how does a new verb formed from a noun differ from the original root verb? What does gift connote that give does not?
One argument is that gift has a limited legitimate use when it refers to a large donation left by a benefactor. For example:
The new wing was gifted to the hospital by the estate of John Q. Smith.
For the most part, though, gift, as a verb, is just a meme — a mind-virus that has infected the language through unreasoned repetition.
Gift is often used as a verb in commentaries on various sports. It is used in the sense of 'present [some party] with an easy opportunity to take an advantage', for instance 'Warne gifted Petersen a four-ball.' It is often used in football in the completive sense: 'England gifted Sweden two goals.' The word gave if used in these examples would not carry the same connotation of incompetence, and in the first example would be arguably delexical.
I agree that in other usages it sounds pretentious.