{"id":1187,"date":"2021-12-15T08:28:24","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T08:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=1187"},"modified":"2021-12-15T08:28:24","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T08:28:24","slug":"christmas-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2021\/12\/15\/christmas-gifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, a friend of mine received an email saying that because of their hard work in difficult circumstances this year, he and his colleagues would all be \u201cgifted\u201d a few extra days off over Christmas. And the other day I saw someone else wondering on Facebook: \u2018when did the word \u201cgiven\u201d cease to exist, and why is everything \u201cgifted\u201d now?\u2019 So with the festive season fast approaching, it seems like a good time to ask: is there really something funny going on with the word gift<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Once you gift it a bit of thought, I don\u2019t think I am gifting anything away by pointing out that the verb to give<\/em> is still very much with us. But the rise of a rival verb to gift<\/em>, in some contexts where you\u2019d expect to give<\/em>, has been receiving attention for a while now: in recent years it has been discussed on National Public Radio in the US (The Season of Gifting<\/a>) and in The Atlantic<\/em> magazine (‘Gift’ is Not a Verb<\/a>). Whether or not it bothers you personally, you may well have noticed the trend. The existence of gift<\/em> as a noun is just a mundane fact of life, but apparently the corresponding verb gets people talking. <\/p>\n

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Gifted children<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, nobody would be surprised to learn that English changes over time, or even that it has pairs of words that mean more or less the same thing\u2026 how much difference is there between liberty<\/em> and freedom<\/em>, or between little<\/em> and small<\/em>? And in fact, synonyms have an important role to play in language change. If we look back and notice that one expression has been replaced by another \u2013 a historical change in the vocabulary, as when the Shakespearian anon<\/em> gave way to at once<\/em> \u2013 then there must have been an intervening period when they were both around with pretty much the same meaning, and people had a choice of which one to use. <\/p>\n

Does that mean that we do now find ourselves in the very early stages of a long historical process which will eventually result in to gift<\/em> replacing to give<\/em> altogether? If that\u2019s the case, in a few generations\u2019 time people will be saying things like \u2018Never gift up!\u2019 or \u2018Could you gift me a hand?\u2019. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Frankly, my dear, I don’t gift a damn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But whatever happens in the future, that clearly isn\u2019t the situation now. So if English often provides multiple ways of saying the same thing, why have people taken the coexistence of to give<\/em> and to gift<\/em> as something to get worked up about \u2013 and can linguistics shed any light on what is going on here?<\/p>\n

One thing that makes this specific pairing stand out is that the two words are just so similar. Gift<\/em> is obviously connected with give<\/em> in the first place: that makes it easy to wonder why anyone would bother to avoid the obvious word, only to pick an almost identical one. Another factor (as the title of The Atlantic<\/em> article makes clear) is the idea that gift<\/em> is really a noun, and so people shouldn\u2019t go around using it as a verb. <\/p>\n

But if we take a broader view, it turns out that what is happening with to gift<\/em> is not out of the ordinary. Instead, it fits neatly with some things that linguists have already noticed about English and about language change more generally. For one thing, English is very good at \u2018using nouns as verbs\u2019 \u2013 which is why we can hammer<\/em> (verb) with a hammer<\/em> (noun), fish<\/em> (verb) for fish<\/em> (noun), and so on. So a verb gift<\/em>, meaning \u2018give as a gift\u2019, goes well with what the language already does. What often happens is that when a new verb of this kind starts to take off, not all speakers are happy about it, but after a while it gains acceptance. For example, the twentieth century saw complaints about verbs-from-nouns such as to host<\/em>, to access<\/em> or to showcase<\/em>, but they grate less on people nowadays. <\/p>\n

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You could even try hammering with a fish!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ultimately, the ability to create words like this is just an \u2018accidental\u2019 fact about English, which also has various other ways of making verbs from nouns \u2013 for example, turning X into \u2018X-ify\u2019 (person-ify, object-ify<\/em>) or \u2018be-X\u2019 (be-friend, be-witch<\/em>). The bigger question may be: as we already have the verb give<\/em>, why would anyone bother to make a verb gift<\/em> in the first place, and why would it ever catch on? It might seem that by definition, a gift is something you give, so inventing a term meaning \u2018give as a gift\u2019 is pointless.<\/p>\n

But that is not how things really are. Gifts are given, but that doesn\u2019t mean that everything that can be given counts as a gift: a traffic warden might give you a parking ticket and in return you might give him a piece of your mind, but the noun gift<\/em> doesn\u2019t cover either of those things. Among other restrictions on its use, it is generally associated with positive feelings: if you give something as a gift, it is usually something tangible that you expect to be warmly received, and that carries over into the verb to gift<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This subtle difference between to give<\/em> and to gift<\/em> explains why for the moment it is impossible to gift someone a sidelong glance, or lots of extra work to do. But apparently it is becoming possible to gift an employee some time off, even though that is not a physical present that can be handed over and unwrapped. Evidently, the writer just felt like using a verb that sounded a bit more interesting and positive than to give<\/em>, and the \u2018warmly received\u2019 part of the meaning was enough to outweigh the lack of any tangible object involved. <\/p>\n

This is an example of something that happens all the time in language change. Naturally, while a word is still restricted in its use, it is more noticeable and interesting than a word you hear regularly. As a result, sometimes people decide to go for the less common word even where it doesn\u2019t quite belong, to achieve some kind of extra effect\u2026 but over time, this process makes the word sound less and less special, until it eventually becomes the new normal. We don\u2019t even need to look far to find this happening precisely to the word \u2018gift\u2019 in other languages: French donner<\/em> \u2018give\u2019 is based on don<\/em> \u2018gift\u2019, and it has totally wiped out the normal verb for give<\/em> that \u2018should\u2019 have been inherited from Latin. <\/p>\n

So if speakers and writers of English continue to chip away at the restrictions on gift<\/em> as a verb, maybe one day it really will replace give<\/em> altogether. Of course, that idea sounds totally outlandish at the moment \u2013 but then, I\u2019m sure the ancient Romans would have thought much the same thing. You never know what will happen next: language change truly is the gift that keeps on giving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, a friend of mine received an email saying that because of their hard work in difficult circumstances this year, he and his colleagues would all be \u201cgifted\u201d a few extra days off over Christmas. And the other day I saw someone else wondering on Facebook: \u2018when did the word \u201cgiven\u201d cease to exist, and why is everything \u201cgifted\u201d now?\u2019 So with the festive season fast approaching, it seems like a good time to ask: is there really something funny…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,75,22,87],"tags":[],"coauthors":[61],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-lexicon","category-prescriptivism","category-speaker-variation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}