WORDS: DONATE

THE Daily Express was among the few newspapers that consistently described Bernie Ecclestone's million as a "gift" to the Labour Party. Others preferred to call it a donation, adding that the party claimed it had been "freely donated". The Daily Telegraph's Wednesday splash used "donation" and "donated" so often (it had nine donations, four donateds and only one gift) that it seemed to be deliberately avoiding the shorter and more obvious word, almost as if it thought a donation might have something suspicious about it that a gift had not, which is moderate nonsense. Virgil's line about the Trojan horse, when the priest Laocoon says "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes", is not usually translated as "I fear the Greeks and their donations". Incidentally one of the meanings of "gift" in the Middle Ages, which survives in the 1611 Bible, was "a bribe". The only difference between gifts and donations, I would have thought, is that gifts might be personal, rather than for some institution or cause.

But I wonder how many people would agree that "donate" is a rather horrible word. One expects to hear it from lawyer's clerks and police witnesses, who are not supposed to speak in the common language of men. We are also used to people donating blood, a clinical term almost. I don't think any blood money passed between Mr Blair and Mr Ecclestone.

It was clearly a back-formation from the much older "donation", which originally meant not a gift but the act of giving, so there was some point in "donation", but I see none in "donate". Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler's English Usage classes it with certain other back-formations of which he says that "for many people" they are "as tasteless as withered violets." Burchfield is keen not to sound prescriptive, so he writes "for many people", by which he probably means "in my opinion". Anyway, he can count me in.

Nicholas Bagnall