Yeah, yeah, I know. ‘Language is not stagnant, blahblahblah…’ But from commercials to news articles, I keep coming across ‘gift’, and its past tense ‘gifted’, being used as a verb. It’s starting to bug me. Gift is a noun. Using ‘gift’ as a verb grates worse than using ‘invite’ instead of ‘invitation’.
That’s what’s known in the grammar world as a gerund. That is, a noun that is used as a verb.
Sort of like seat. “Please seat these people at table 3”.
I have to admit it annoys me a bit too. When it’s used in place of “give,” “gift” seems to me to be condescending as well - to my ear, it seems to be asserting that the person giving the object is of a significantly higher status than the person receiving the object (that could be just me…).
No, I think you’re on to something here.
“Gift” as a verb is perfectly fine. It has a meaning more specific than “give” – namely, to make a present of – that wasn’t being filled by another verb. And in modern English, a word’s part of speech is determined by its placement in a clause, not by, morphology. Also, the OED has “gift” being used as a verb as early as Wodehouse, and as no specific year is given, the usage is probably older than that.
A gerund ends with “ing” and makes a verb into a noun. “Read” is a verb - in the sentence “The reading of the will occurred at noon” “reading” is a gerund. That doesn’t apply to “gift”
Yeah, I accept that (and it is useful to distinguish between giving as a gift and the more general form of giving) - I just find it mildly irritating.
Excellent - I’m not alone…
Well, that is the primary definition of “give.”
But I can give you something that isn’t a gift. I can give you your paycheck. I can give you the salt and pepper and expect it back when you’re done. I can even give you a hard time. 
“Gift” as a verb means one and only one very specific thing: to make a present of something. It’s useful.
So you can only gerund a verb.
Seems like a new usage to me, at least in my experience.
I wonder if it comes about from “present” being another word for “gift” and “present” with a slightly different pronunciation meaning to give a gift. So "gift’ gets the same usage as “present” whether it should or not.
I also suspect there is internet jargon to blame here.
I’ll see your gift and raise you a conversating.
That’s just silly slang, though, isn’t it? Like “edumacation”? Seems more like people playing with sound than truly creating a new word.
Where do we stand on “actionable”? That one’s been driving me batty lately. Seems like stupid corporate jargon, but it does provide an adjective form that I’m not sure we have another word for.
The people I know who use conversating are not playing.
In a consumer culture where the strict notion of “gift” has been turned into “here, I was suckered into buying this for you” or, worse, “something you get ‘free’ for spending money,” there isn’t really any other verb that describes the transaction.
I mean, “Shit your friends with this lovely TV remote stand/beer cooler” is maybe a little too close to the quick, eh?
I think I was the one who started that conversation, having had an employment dance with an online marketing concept firm who made a big deal of how they generate “actionable online leads.” The prez turned out to be older and wiser than I would have guessed, and brushed aside my gentle inquiries about the use of the term.
Since the dance ended and we went on to different partners, I can say I think the usage is stupid and an example of how neologisming can go teriblee rong.
The Shorter OED p1103 disagrees with you. One of the examples given is an extract from Wodehouse.
Can we talk about schooling, please? Is it just me or is that a titch not just right?
I was surprised a few years back to see that word in Jack Vance’s 1950 “The Dying Earth”
"“I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”
The OP is a few centuries late to the party. The OED shows it’s been used as a noun since before 1627.
Did you look this up in any dictionary before claiming it’s wrong?