But there is no real ambiguity. Give has always meant a change of ownership. If there’s a problem, it’s caused by people saying give when they really mean lend.
As others have pointed out, the use of GIFT as a verb is not new; it has just seen a resurgence in recent years.
And words change meaning all the time anyway. That is inevitable in any living language. DOG Once was specifically made to imply a certain breed of domestic canine, while HOUND was the generic; now it is the reverse. ADULT was strictly a noun meaning “grown end up person” when I was a child, but around the early 80s the adjective or meaning “sexually oriented” was added, and in the last decade has increasingly become a verb meaning “to behave competently in the manner of a grown-up person” as well. None of these changes are bad, and even if they were it is pointless to rail against them. You might as well try to order the incoming tide to reseed. If you want a language who’s vocabulary never changes, you will have to confine yourself to Latin, Sindarin, or Klingon.
I daresay you are correct about the way VERSE has come to mean VERSUS in the mouths of mini speakers, but I would add that errors like that are largely how language changes over time. It would not surprise me if, in a century or two, VERSE was the standard form for that meeting (except that I would be really surprised to find myself alive in a hundred years, let alone two).
With the understanding that people argue about the meaning of words all the time, as well as the disagreements between descriptivists and prescriptivists, I just looked up the definition of “give” on Merriam-Webster.
First definition:
None of the definitions given say anything about expecting to get the thing given back. In fact, one of the examples of the use of “give” in a sentence is:
That does not represent a fair summary of the common connotations of “give.”
If I give you a definition, or if I give you my name, or if I give you my pencil so you can write down your telephone number for me, am I necessarily transferring ownership of something to you?
See here for example — give - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
It also ignores the fact that “gift” can comnotatr a specific kind of giving. If you give me a receipt for my purchase, that’s not a gift, for example.
I don’t like rhetorical questions either, but they are hardly knew. I remember looking up the word “rhetorical” in sixth grade — so around 1980 — upon first hearing the term, and my youthful inability to parse the meaning is what led to me learning the definition of “idiom.”
They aren’t new at all - Cicero probably used them! But, this particular tic, common in interviews with sports coaches and almost as common among political pundits (and not uncommon among politicians), is very much a “thing” that started maybe ten years ago at most.
I don’t think “curate” is overused. It’s used infrequently enough that when I need to use it I can’t think of it, which also shows that it serves a purpose at least to me since there isn’t one word that means exactly what it means. “A selection of …” captures 95% of the intent but sometimes does not fit grammatically and in any case is longer.