Gift Horse

Christian Lorentzen Rejects 'Gifting'

It would be ungrateful to greet the seemingly new and suddenly ubiquitous if unaccustomed usage of a familiar word with resistance. It would be churlish upon looking such a gift horse in the mouth and finding that indeed the usage dates to the sixteenth century and has since been attested if not widely at least authoritatively in church records of all places then to object to its seepage into the vernacular and, further, into formal prose, not to mention poetry, in reputable publications and at international literary events. Yet I am stricken, my ears pounded and scratched, my eyes repulsed and my vision blurred as if by the blooming of fresh cataracts, at the sight and sound of this gift, which is the word ‘gift’ itself, specifically its use as a transitive verb. ‘To gift’ is no gift to me.

I suspect but cannot prove – because I am no detective or expert in these matters but merely a crank or a buff with some rudimentary training and strong opinions that demand to be registered before the language acquiesces and finally accepts ‘to gift’ like a child on Christmas morning, the wrapping paper in shreds on the rug and the receipt finally tossed in the bin, the point of no return, as it were, of linguistic commerce – that the resurgence of the transitive usage first took off from the coinage of ‘re-gifting’, merely a rumble in the language until the turn of the twenty-first century when it became not only permissible but practical (because, hey, why not?) to take something somebody gave you and give it on to somebody else, under a transparent veil of false pretenses, as if it isn’t the thought that counts because nothing really counts, especially at, say, an office holiday party or the birthday of an unbeloved cousin.

Once the stigma of re-gifting had withered, why not start slinging around ‘gift’ as if it were one of those switch-hitting words, both noun and verb, like drink or wink or stink? I can think of two good reasons. In any context the transitive ‘gift’ or ‘gifted’ is used, a simple ‘give’ or ‘gave’ will do (not to mention other such ready synonyms as bestow, grant, or furnish). And further, to those who may object that ‘give’ is insufficiently denotative of friendly generosity – after all, if I gave you the heebie-jeebies you’d never accuse me of gifting them to you, unless you were being ironic – consider the elegance of the constructions ‘to give as a gift’ or ‘to give the gift of’, which trained Latinists will recognise as the anglophone equivalents of the ‘cognate accusative’.

You might say the Irishman who in the 1980s made radio hits with his band out of reworked hymns – ‘I will sing / sing a new song’ and so forth – was and is a gifted vocalist. And that past passive participial usage of ‘gift’ has surely figured in the permission people have felt granted them to deploy the active indicative forms. It wasn’t always so. Here is Fowler on the matter:

gift (verb). Despite its antiquity (first recorded in the 16c.) and its frequent use, esp. by Scottish writers, since then, it has fallen out of favour among standard speakers in England, and is best avoided. On the other hand, gifted ppl adj. ‘talented’ (a gifted violinist) is standard.

When I noticed an English writer using the transitive ‘gift’ in a prestigious paper, I took the usage up with one of its editors, a Scotswoman whose fastidiousness is notorious, and showed her the entry in Fowler and she joked that it was perhaps a trace race memory that led to her leniency. In Kosovo I was doing a public reading with several other writers, including a Kosovar poet and her Montenegrin-American translator, and the translation of the first poem from Albanian, which struck me as wonderful, like first hearing the verse of a living Balkan Rimbaud, deployed the transitive ‘gift’, and I asked after the reading if it was a verb more specific than ‘to give’, and I was told indeed it was, so with this last objection I surrender my protest. At this moment in history, something’s gotta give if not gift.

Christian Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine and Bookforum. He also publishes a Substack.

This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.