Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it?
My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it seemed like an Americanism. Fourthly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes.
In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage said that gift as a verb was ‘best avoided’, as it had fallen out of favour with speakers of standard English. In 2015 Jeremy Butterfield’s revision of Fowler noted that gift as a verb is relatively more frequent in British English than in American. So I was wrong there. It has, however, been more frequent in Scottish English.
Both of these philologists observe that gift is a verb that has been in use for some time, at least from the 16th century. One could gift something to someone or gift someone with something.
In past centuries the gifts with which people were endowed often turned out to be miraculous, perhaps God-given (such as the gift of tongues) or a gift of nature, such as the gift of the gab. Anyone with these endowments could be called gifted, and we do not shy at it used as in ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, recorded by Nina Simone in 1969, but more familiar in Britain from the version by Bob and Marcia the following year: ‘When you’re young, gifted and black/ Your soul’s intact.’
One use of gift as a verb seems to Butterfield hard to replace: the footballing term, as in ‘Gary Neville gifted Arsenal their equaliser.’
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