Why has behalf so rapidly collapsed into misuse? Everyone says things like ‘On my behalf I don’t want money’, or ‘The car crashed through bad driving on your behalf’. Rather than attributing the action to a vicarious agent, they simply mean ‘for my part’ or ‘on your part’. I should like to see what the Oxford English Dictionary has found out about this usage, but it has not updated its entry for behalf since 1887.
Even then, it was bemoaning the ‘loss of an important distinction’ between in behalf of and on behalf of. Someone complained to The Spectator 202 years ago about a line in a play that ‘ought, by no means, to be presented to a chaste and regular audience’. A lover in the play spoke of his beloved Harriet, and longed ‘to fold these arms about the waist of that beauteous struggling, and at last yielding fair.’
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