Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 11 December 2004

A Lexicographer writes

issue 11 December 2004

John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: ‘Verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed — but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life.’

‘When and why did “progress” become a verb, as in “Let’s progress this development”?’ he wonders. ‘Probably about the same time as “impact”.’ But it is not difficult to discover that this speculation is wrong. Progress, having had a successful career as a noun since the early 15th century, took up a vacancy as a verb in the 16th; Shakespeare uses it. If Mr Humphrys’s hatred is not, as he first implied, of a noun recently turned verb, is it of progress newly used transitively (that is, with an object)? No, for progress, as in ‘progress this development’, has been so used since 1875 or earlier.

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