NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT ¨C Considering an expensive gift this season for someone you love? CNBC urges you to be careful: ¡°What to think about before you gift a Peloton or other big-ticket item this holiday.¡± And if by chance you¡¯re as curmudgeonly about grammar as I, you bristle at this casual use of ¡°gift¡± as a verb.
Yet the usage is everywhere. ¡°Holiday gifting made easy!¡± we¡¯re assured by Nordstrom. Amazon offers what it calls ¡°Prime Gifting.¡± U.S. News and World Report actually manages to use the word as verb and noun in the same headline: ¡°How to Gift Stock and Other Financial Gifts.¡±
Grammarians have battled for years over whether ¡°gift¡± and ¡°give¡± are interchangeable verbs. It¡¯s time somebody gave a definitive answer. And the answer this Grammar Scrooge gives is no. Except in a narrow set of circumstances ¡ª I will describe them shortly ¡ª we can never gift a thing to another person. We can only give. To those who would give a different answer, let me give you the gift of explaining why you¡¯re wrong.
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