“Gifting”

The holidays are here and people have started their Christmas shopping. In some cases, they’ve already finished. I know someone who does their Christmas shopping a year ahead of time, which I find not only incredibly organized but optimistic. Buying something that far out is a risk. The other person may change, you may change, the significance of the gift may change. In fact, the whole endeavor seems downright foolhardy, which is a word you don’t see much anymore. Too bad. It fits so many situations.

Spinning boomerang balls. That’s what I’m giving my grandchildren this year. These are polyethylene spheres that flash multiple colors and fly back at you after you throw them into the air. It’s what you get when you cross a gyroscope, a boomerang, drone technology, and Vegas. It was invented by an obsessed NASA engineer who had worked on an antigravity device. Either he was involved in UFOs, or was the grandson of a Nazi physicist. One of the two, maybe both.

The promotional material claims that these balls can bring families together, spark creativity, and get the kids away from their screens out into the sunshine. As the song goes, who could ask for anything more? Besides, nothing says the birth of our Savior and the Light to the Gentiles more than space age kitsch (cf., Calling all Kitsch).

All right, I may not be the best gift giver, which is why I made a habit this year of saving emails with interesting products. I figured I could comb through them for ideas without having to scramble at the last minute. These include a “coin eating” piggy bank, high stretch men’s pants, tactical assault pen, swiveling bit holder, full skull mask, dragon lamp, and a pack of suggestive bird coasters. That last one had drawings of cocks, peckers, hooters, boobies, and shags as well as nine different types of “tit” birds. You know, for the ornithologist in all of us.

At least half the list was for adults, so I was hard pressed to find something for the grandkids. One will get a chemistry set and another an artist’s supply kit, but the rest will enjoy hours of fun in the sunshine playing with their spinning boomerang balls. I don’t expect the balls to last long, but they certainly won’t suffer the fate of the dozen or so balsa wood airplanes gifted previously.

And there’s the rub. All of a sudden, the noun gift has turned into a transitive verb taking a direct object as in “I gifted my grandchildren with boomerang balls.” It can also take an indirect object as in “I gifted boomerang balls to them.” I’ll let you imagine the possibilities for misinterpretation in those examples. Now, the past participle has entered the English lexicon in the form of gifted. This is not to be confused with the adjective describing someone with extraordinary talent. In this new sense, once someone has given you a gift, consider yourself gifted. Step aside and make room for the next person on the list.

The grammarians among you may protest that gift has been used this way since the mid eighteenth century and that I should get off my pedantic high horse. I agree. The problem is that when I see gift used as a verb, the author often comes prancing into town on a high horse of his own. But this kind of horse trading (i.e., pedantry for hipness) simply doesn’t work.

As the swiveling bit holder manufacturer put it, “Wait, there’s more!” To wit, a new noun has emerged in the form of gifter. Yes, gifter, which rhymes with grifter and stands for pool, as another song goes. “Good, God!” you exclaim à la Laurence Stern, “‘twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this world!” (cf., Upside Down).

It provokes me. Are there other things I could be paying attention to instead like the threat of nuclear war, an economic crisis, and political mayhem in the country? I suppose so, but we’ve all got to do our part even if that part is to object to the abuse and misuse of language. After all, isn’t such manipulation at the heart of what irks us? That, incidentally, is a warning to curtail exposure to social media, which should be called anti-social media.

And maybe we ought to curtail all of this gift giving in the first place. How many gifts do we really need? Each year our homes look more and more like Amazon distribution centers. I predict some new entries in the dictionary for next year: gifting porn, gifting orgy, and post-gift dysphoria. Think of the coasters we can create.

Image credits: feature by Rob Laughter; presents by Val Vesa. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”