Mea Culpa: There are no medals for gifting the ball to your opponents

We used “gift” as a verb a few times last week. In an article about perfume diffusers (I know, I know), we described a particularly well presented one as “a great one for gifting”.

I can’t explain why this grates on me, and why I think it would be better to write “a great one for a present”. Some nouns can be turned into verbs quite happily: you can chair a meeting, fool around and then sleep soundly. But some newer verbings meet customer resistance. I’m not sure about “to holiday” or “to lunch” and I draw the line at “to medal”.

Mind you, if we disallow “gift” as a verb, it will make sports reporting difficult. Hardly any match report is complete without one team “gifting” the ball to their opponents.

Last week, for example, we wrote: “There will be none of the inconsistency or errors that saw Australia gift multiple points to the Welsh in their encounter last month.” All it means is “give away”, but with the implied metaphor of tying a bow round it and presenting it as a gift.

That report also used “multiple” where my preference would be “several”. I would say the match “saw Australia give away several points to the Welsh”.

We used “multiple” several times in this sense last week; although we used “several” about three times as often. As with “gift”, I find it hard to explain why I find “multiple” an ugly word, although in its case it may be the flavour of court reporting – “multiple stab wounds” – and the doomed attempt to avoid sounding vague.

But the point is that many readers dislike these uses. They may be irrational to do so, but it is only in our interest to avoid them.

Tech jargon: We had a wonderful confusion of plurals and tenses in a report about Twitter’s shares falling by 19 per cent. The company had admitted a number of problems, including: “User data also was still being collected even after they believe they had opted out of a feature that asked them if Twitter could use device-specific settings to personalise their timeline.”

The “they” refers to the users whose data is referred to at the start of the sentence, and these users believed they had opted out – in the past tense. But this is where tech jargon gets you. The “device-specific settings” were also unnecessary, so we could tidy up the whole thing thus: “Information about users was still being collected even after they opted out of a feature that asked them if Twitter could personalise their timeline.”

Pancake: Do you remember those innocent days in politics when Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, used to make David Cameron go pink with irritation by doing what was known as his “flatlining” gesture in the House of Commons? I used to point out that this was the wrong term to describe an economy that is not growing – that is, in which a graph showing the size of the economy is basically flat.

“Flatlining” was originally a word used to describe the monitors showing heart or brain activity in a seriously ill patient. When the trace “flatlines” it means the patient is dead. Bad though the financial crisis was, the British economy survived.

Indeed, it was still there last week, when we commented: “You would expect businesses’ day to day borrowing to be fairly constant at a time when the economy has basically been flatlining.”