As Language Changes
I find I have trouble with new words. Not new vocabulary, like interesting words I encounter when reading the New Yorker magazine or Hans Christian Anderson: European Witness by Paul Binding, which currently rests on my bedside table. I don’t have trouble learning new words; I have trouble accepting new words.
"Gifting." Now what was so wrong with the verb "to give" that it was necessary to coin a new verb? I grasp that "gifting" has to do with "making a gift," as distinct from transferring something from one person to another or making a gesture that requires no response. A philanthropist might make a gift to an institution as Jerry Perenchio recently did of a large collection of works of modern art to the Los Angeles Museum of Art.
He did not, however “gift” those objects to the museum. A gift is something that comes with no strings attached. Mr. Perenchio knotted some strings around the pictures. LACMA gets nothing until Mr. Perenchio kicks the proverbial bucket and then only provided that the museum has completed its proposed renovations, a rather astonishing structure designed by Swiss architect and Pritzker-Prize winner Peter Zumthor, which should be open by 2023. That’s only nine years away and it’s one heck of a complex.
No, if Mr. Perenchio was freely giving—or “gifting”—his collection to LACMA, there would be no stipulations. A gift is a gift. The Oxford English Dictionary does recognize “gift” as a verb: it defines gifting as 1) “To endow or furnish with gifts; to endow, invest, or present with as a gift or 2) “To bestow as a gift; to make a present of.” The OED furthermore defines a gift as “The action of giving, an instance of the same; a giving, bestowal… as a gift, gratuitously, for nothing.” Mr. Perenchio is making an arrangement with the museum. There is a quid pro quo in place: you can have my art if you do for me something I want you to to.
While “gifting” is not a neologism—usage in the OED is documented in quotations ranging from 1619 to 1884—the word grates on my ear. It comes to me as something fuzzy in meaning, as deliberately ambiguous so as not to be confined to any denotative corner. Yes, I also cringe when I hear “impact” used as as a verb, especially when teeth are not the subject under discussion.And in this age of xenophobia, I’d find it helpful if people would distinguish between “immigrants”—folks entering a country with the intention of staying there—and “emigrants” or residents choosing to leave their country behind, presumably for good.
I also wish people could get a grip in the difference between “I” (a pronoun referring to myself used as the subject of a verb) and “me” (a pronoun referring to myself used as the object of a verb). But then, I wish, even more, that people would make a marginal effort to make the antecedents of any pronoun clear.
Of course language changes; it is the nature of language to accommodate new ideas and new information. I just wish that old folks like me could depend on old, familiar and dependable words as a means of finding our way into those new ideas and new facts—and learning the vocabulary that we must learn if we are not to find ourselves irretrievably distant from the world that, for better or for worse, is the world of our dotage.
