ARE YOU GIFTED OR HAVE YOU GIFTED?

Today I heard a phrase (sadly, not for a first time, I might add) that made me wince. A woman on a show I won’t name here said: “But I gifted them a set in exchange for the gear” Ooh, how I wanted to scream at the TV set again. Sometimes I think that if I could see myself from outside of my body (wouldn’t that be cool?!), I’d most likely think I was totally insane. Because what kind of sane person screams at the TV set on regular basis?

But lets’ go back to the issue at hand. This is an example of yet another common error Americans make while speaking. Sometimes it seems to me that to most people it really doesn’t matter if a word functions only as a noun; they will make it work as a verb and to hell with the language rules. The scary part is that nobody corrects them either for fear of being rude or because they simply don’t know the proper way and don’t want to make fools of themselves.

Even though I’ve been observing these episodes of total disregard for quality of language for a while now, I am still quite baffled at the reasons behind and, of course, the frequency of occurrence. I will solve this puzzle one day!

Anyway, have you even realized why the sentence I quoted is so unacceptable? There are so many reasons I don’t even know where to begin… Firstly, ‘gifted’ means “talented, showing that somebody has great natural talent or intelligence, as in ‘a gifted performance’ and exceptional” (according to Encarta Dictionary). Secondly, ‘a gift’ is either something given to another person, a special talent or an act of giving, e.g. her gift was…

While ‘gifted’ does function as a verb, it is formal and used only in written language, especially journalism (in British English), and in this function it means “to give something to somebody without their having to make any effort to get it”. I did find, however, in one of the American dictionaries, an explanation of ‘gift’ as a transitive verb meaning “to give or concede something to somebody as a gift”. As much as it offends my senses (since I was trained in the British English mainly, although we did have classes on the differences between British and American), I supposed the sentence I quoted earlier is quite acceptable in American. I, for one, am not going to acknowledge this as a valid verb (in the strictly American usage).

So I guess this is how it goes (when it comes to Americans): if you that often enough and if enough people will pick it up, eventually it will make its way to a dictionary and thus the main stream.