My gifted dog gifted me with a gift of... explanation?

December 16, 2012 3:58 PM

Calling all language nerds: anyone know what's behind the increasing frequence of "gifted" as a verb?

I am befuddled by the rise I'm observing in the (to me, awkward) use of "gifted" as a verb. You know, "my boss gifted me a pony" instead of "my boss gave me a pony." Or "I was gifted with a giant purple orangutang sculpture" instead of "I was given a giant purple orangutang sculpture." I am not describing uses such as "That demon was exceptionally gifted at instilling fear and horror."

I recognize that language is constantly evolving, and I also realize that as I've been sensitized to observing this (to me unpleasant) usage, there's probably some confirmation bias going on. But I could swear it's been on the upswing over the last 18 months, and I have no idea how to research something like this.

So, assuming this is a real trend, does anyone know what's behind it? Or am I imagining this? If you use it, why do you choose "gifted" over "gave" or "given"?

posted by amelioration to Writing & Language (29 answers total)

I've heard it a lot in the financial services industry over the last 15 years. Gifting money to heirs, gifting money to charities...
posted by cecic at 4:01 PM on December 16, 2012

I am inclined to believe, on no evidence at all, that it is a relatively recent phenomenon. It sounds New Agey to me, but I can't put my finger on why. On preview, bleedover from finance and/or law sounds just as plausible.

I probably wouldn't use it in general, but it seems like an attempt to be more precise - "gave" is very broad and covers any instance of handing something over (and also includes less literal usage like "I gave my cat a bath") whereas "gifted" is limited to "gave as a gift."
posted by restless_nomad at 4:03 PM on December 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

I've heard it more and more too.

Part of this may just be the circles I run in—and perhaps the circles you run in too.

Part of it, I speculate, may be the free & open-source software movement, which gets people talking about the concept of a "gift economy," which leads to increased use of "gifted" for "give."
posted by adamrice at 4:04 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

My Indian friends and relatives use that phrasing a lot. Maybe it's a Britishism?
posted by discopolo at 4:05 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

I am befuddled by the rise I'm observing in the (to me, awkward) use of "gifted" as a verb

This falls under the general trend of the verbing of nouns.
posted by deanc at 4:08 PM on December 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

As a Brit, I would have described it as an Americanism...
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:09 PM on December 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

This didn't just start 18 months ago. The Wall Street Journal had a whole article about it in 2006, which said:

the use of "gift" as a verb isn't new. Most dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, include a definition of the term as a transitive verb. . . .

Why the recent surge in "gifting"? Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, blames celebrity magazines commenting on the red-carpet freebies that stars receive. "Julia Roberts was gifted with this fabulous item," she mocks. "They just want to sound like they're doing something extra fancy."

Another theory is that it derives from the world of accounting, as in writing something off as a "gift." "Gifting" is also the inevitable precursor to "regifting" which became part of the vernacular after an episode of "Seinfeld" that aired in January 1995.

The gift-as-a-verb fad got a big boost last year with the launch of iTunes6. At the press conference in October 2005, Chief Executive Steve Jobs stood in front of a massive screen introducing the new "gifting" feature that allows iTunes users to buy a song or file and give it to another user.

You feel like it's suddenly started showing up all over the place because you happened to notice it at one point, which caused you to notice it again. See recency illusion; see also Baader Meinhoff syndrome (which is inexplicably lacking a Wikipedia entry).
posted by John Cohen at 4:09 PM on December 16, 2012 [8 favorites]

Google ngrams can help to confirm such suspicions, but can't tell you how they started. In this case it looks as though it's been on the rise since around 1960 and shows no sign of slowing.

Linguistic evolution is so complex and interconnected that -- for most expressions -- you're probably never going to be able to put your finger on a certain points and say "There. That's where it started." It's a big chaotic system and sometimes things pop out. I think of it like weather -- you can't say exactly where and when a storm started, you just watch it accrue.

These shifts are happening all the time, and we notice the ones that annoy us the most. I think I'm fairly immune to "gifting" now, but infuriated by the use of "reach out to" as (by now) a bald synonym for "contact". "We reached out to Megacorp Inc. for their reactions before going to press..." -- no you didn't, you pillocks, you phoned them. Still, I'm sure time will inure me to this one too.
posted by pont at 4:11 PM on December 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

How old are you? You might have just crossed the age where people start worrying about taxes, inheritances, mortgage down payments, etc. More and more of your peers are encountering the word in those other contexts so they're using it more and you're hearing it more.
posted by gerryblog at 4:14 PM on December 16, 2012

I think it has to do with wanting to emphasize the generosity of the giver over the actual object received -- as in "they gave this to me as a gift, aren't they fantastic." The "gifting guides" magazines run every December probably have an effect as well -- I definitely remember seeing "gifting" as a gerund before I saw the usage "to gift."

(The usage "Y gifted me with an X," which to me is even more cringe-inducing than "Y gifted me an X," seems like an extension of the emphasis-on-generosity principle -- instead of just "gifted" standing in for "gave," the emphasis of the sentence is now on "Y gifted me!" and "with an X" is an afterthought. Argh.)
posted by ostro at 4:14 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

One thing I find interesting about it -- and it might just be confirmation bias now that I've made this association -- but I find that people use "gifted" more in a negative context. Like "My boss gifted me with a pony, but I can't afford to board it." Which adds an element of obligation and conveys the complex emotions around gift giving and receiving.

Also, I think "gift" as a verb is up there with "utilize" and other forms of Corporate Speak and hypercorrection that have seeped into ordinary life. I more often hear it used by people who are less educated and want to sound fancy by using a five dollar word where a ten-cent one will do.
posted by Sara C. at 4:25 PM on December 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

I don't think the Google Ngram is going to help with the verb usage you're asking about as it doesn't differentiate between "gifted" the adjective (as in "gifted child") and the verbing of it.
posted by ShooBoo at 4:49 PM on December 16, 2012

This use of the verb in this way is at least 200 years old. The earliest seem to come from Scotland.
posted by Jehan at 5:04 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

ShooBoo, I ngram-searched for "gifting" for that very reason! Interestingly, phrases like "gifted me" (which should also restrict it to verbs) show the same recent increase but also big spikes in the early 19th century; a quick search in Google Books suggests that back then it was mainly used in mental/spiritual senses -- "that glorious talent with which heaven has gifted me" and suchlike.

Interestingly, "gifted child" seems to have peaked in the 1960s; I wonder what's taking its place.
posted by pont at 5:05 PM on December 16, 2012

I would have guessed, based on nothing, that it's coming from social media/video games where you give fellow players prizes or rewards. I feel like they use that terminology.

I was in "Gifted and Talented" classes in school, but that is using the word as an adjective so I don't see how it's relevant here.
posted by drjimmy11 at 5:51 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thinking of the most widely-played social media game of the last few years, I googled "Farmville gifting." There are quite a few results.
posted by drjimmy11 at 5:54 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

I agree with Sara C.; "gifted" has the ring of formality and therefore increased cachet, so people use it even where perfectly acceptable words with less (perceived) status exist. I put it in the same category as utilize, source (as a verb, instead of just "get" or "find"), actionable items (instead of "things we can do"), form factor (instead of "shape" or "style"), price point (instead of "price"), etc. etc.
posted by jiawen at 5:57 PM on December 16, 2012

The verb "gift" is not a synonym of "give". It includes the connotation that the thing being given is a present, and that the action is one of friendliness and generosity. "Give" has no such connotation. You can give someone a parking ticket as well as a birthday present.

The usage that comes to mind for me, and that makes total sense, is in iTunes where you have the option to "gift this app." That says it much better than "give this app" would.

So I don't see this as a corruption of English, but rather part of the natural process by which languages allow you to express finer distinctions more clearly and compactly over time.
posted by alms at 6:12 PM on December 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

I first came across this usage with folks involved in Pagan groups in the early '90's. Started hearing New Age types use it in the early 2000's. Been hearing it all over for a good 5 years now.
posted by cat_link at 6:47 PM on December 16, 2012

I think gifted with is not a new collocation. A sentence like "Marian Anderson was gifted with a rich contralto voice" feels well-established to me, not connected with the more recent "I gifted him a dog."

(Hmm, I wonder if "I gifted a dog to him" also works? This is the Dative Alternation, which works with plenty of other verbs that have "giving" or transfer semantics.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:03 PM on December 16, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for the input, everyone. I was aware that it is a correct usage, and one of long standing, but I hadn't really considered the increase in precision provided by the choice of gifted over gave. That certainly makes a lot of sense, though I'm still surprised by the relatively recent (though not as recent as I had noticed) increase in it's popular usage.

Anyway, I'm going to take all of this and try to fine tune my reaction away from "grar weird ugly sounding word construction whyyyyyyyy" to "my, how finely that person is calibrating their word choice."
posted by amelioration at 7:22 PM on December 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

There actually is a difference of meaning between the two words. One can only 'gift', well, 'gifts', but one can 'give' many things, like some pocket change, the finger, an explanation, and so on.
posted by empath at 8:55 PM on December 16, 2012

Sure, there is a difference in meaning between the two words, but people are still overusing 'gifted'. It's one thing to say 'I was gifted $10,000 last year', which makes it clear that someone gave you the money (as opposed to you earning it, or getting paid a dividend, or whatever). 'My parents gifted me a Coach bag for Christmas' is unnecessary. Just use 'gave'.

I actually disagree that it's a finely-calibrated word choice. I also don't really agree with this:

You feel like it's suddenly started showing up all over the place because you happened to notice it at one point, which caused you to notice it again. See recency illusion; see also Baader Meinhoff syndrome (which is inexplicably lacking a Wikipedia entry).

(Although I think everything else John Cohen said is spot-on.)

I think it's part of the trend that SaraC identified, of using dollar words where ten-cent ones would do. I also think it is showing up all over the place in the past couple of years, and I have my own (half-assed, unresearched ;-) theory that this is related to the growth of internet traffic, and forums like this one.

(FWIW, I'm Australian who lived in the UK for 5 years, and I definitely think of this as an Americanism. I think most of the verbal 'trends' that permeate the rest of the world start off in America and kind of ripple outwards from there, for obvious reasons.)
posted by Salamander at 9:11 PM on December 16, 2012

There definitely has been an uptick in "gifted" as a verb. You can see it in Ask, if you search for "gifted" and look at how it's been used in questions over the years.

I was just recently grousing about this very usage to my husband, so I'm with you on disliking it, amelioration. However, even though it I find it ugly, I can't argue that it's pointless or pretentious (in the way that "utilize" for "use" is). "Gifted" definitely improves precision. Many sentences don't have context like "for Christmas" (as in Salamander's example) to make it immediately clear that the object was a gift, not a hand-me-down, a loaner, or something else handed from one person to another for any number of reasons.

Two recent examples from Ask history in which "given" might not have immediately communicated "given as a gift":
I am being gifted several pounds of Kobe beef.
I recently was gifted a coin collection.

Still. Those sentences might be clear and concise, but the usage is ugly nevertheless.
posted by torticat at 10:41 PM on December 16, 2012

Here's a discussion of this sense of "gift" as a verb that traces it back to the 17th Century:

"This sense is noted as being chiefly Scottish and the examples focus heavily on real estate transations or formal bequests of money or objects."
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 11:24 PM on December 16, 2012

I disagree with Harvey. "Is gifted" uses "gifted" as an adjective, and is very, very old. "Gift" as a verb is new, and follows the very unfortunate trend of verbing in English.

I first saw it in connection with legal estate planning discussions, given that making gifts of money or property is one of the recognized transfer techniques.
posted by megatherium at 3:41 AM on December 17, 2012

follows the very unfortunate trend of verbing in English.

It's not a new trend -- was 'turn' a verb or a noun first?
posted by empath at 8:25 AM on December 17, 2012

Farmville? The Atlantic complained about the verbing of gift in 1983.

In any case, the descriptivist view of such things has to be that they wouldn't happen if they didn't perform some useful function or distinction (or eliminate an obsolete one). I can certainly see how it's more descriptive than just gave, but it's also a sort of commerce-y terminology and makes the gifted gift more of an object or commodity (as in gift card, for example). Thus I would certainly avoid it in more personal contexts, e.g. family or birthday gifts. But I wouldn't object much to it in a business context.
posted by dhartung at 11:31 AM on December 17, 2012

I live in India and this is standard usage here.
posted by BusyBusyBusy at 7:33 PM on December 17, 2012