Another way to misuse a verb is to take one that, in the minds of a griper, is either transitive or intransitive but not both, and to use it, to that griperish mind, the wrong way round. Briefly, and without going into the complicating factors, a transitive verb has at least one direct object: ‘the dog ate a poisoned rat’. An intransitive verb has no direct object: ‘the dog died’. Some verbs have ‘dual transitivity’: ‘the dog ate the rat’; ‘the dog ate’. But some verbs are ordinarily used only intransitively or only transitively: we do not generally say that the dog ‘died’ the rat, or that a person faced with mice behind the skirting boards ‘poisoned’.
Yet if ‘X died Y’ or ‘Z poisoned’ would sound distinctly peculiar to most people, there are many verbs that are in the process of crossing this divide. Simon Heffer declares that it is not legitimate to use collapse transitively (‘one cannot collapse a house of cards’), even though it appears to be perfectly normal to ‘collapse’ this and that when required (‘The search party that located the bodies, eight months after death, simply collapsed the tent over them’, Telegraph). He also notes that, ‘thanks to America’, the already suspect intransitive verb to exit—‘suspect’ because he finds the Latin to be at fault—is becoming a transitive verb too. He explains that it is an ‘unnecessary abomination’ to have ‘people exiting buildings’.
Mr Heffer is also against what he sees as exclusively transitive verbs being used intransitively, ‘a price cannot halve’, and so on. And Bill Bryson finds it necessary to warn his readers that they face the ‘slight risk of censure’ if they use the verb warn intransitively: the intransitive expression ‘he warns of the risk of censure’ might, once in a while, he believes, attract censure. It certainly would from Mr Heffer, who writes that ‘warn has not developed into an intransitive verb, despite an enormous effort by semi-literates over the centuries to make it do so’, defending the illogic of this posture by saying that only the transitive use of warn is ‘correct’, because it is—of all things—‘logical’. John Humphrys, in his second book on the English language, Beyond Words, 2006, reveals that he is unmoved by the ‘sweet smile’ of a waitress who says ‘Enjoy!’ to him, and wants to ask her, ‘Don’t you know that “enjoy” is a transitive not an intransitive verb?’ A linguist would explain that in this case there is an ‘unexpressed object’. The waitress herself, compelled to serve Mr Humphrys, might like to reply to his put-down that the OED cites intransitive uses of enjoy from 1380 on. Better yet, she could recite the example it gives from 1549: ‘Yet he neuer enioied after, but in conclusyon pitifully wasted his painful lyfe’.**
When it comes to transitive and intransitive uses, what is perhaps oddest about the bees in the average griper’s bonnet is just how few of them there are. Exit, warn, enjoy? The list is ridiculously small. New or new-sounding** intransitive uses, in particular, abound in current English:
But what strikes is the utter singularity of this wild and barbarous figure. (Guardian)
The idea that Wallace’s curiously ugly, styleless prose style is actually a brilliant commentary on the materialistic anomie of postmodern society fails to convince, because it is so pervasive in ostensibly different voices. (Guardian)
Growing up in Australia, where Anzac day was a public holiday, the subject fascinated more than any other … (Guardian)
Haynes assures that the scale of the job was ‘utterly terrifying …’ (Guardian)
Any decent griper should by now be wondering desperately what strikes whom** (the dispassionate observer?), whom the idea fails to convince (the average metropolitan snob?), whom the subject fascinated (Australian history buffs?), and whom Haynes assures (himself, his psychiatrist?): in short, what the missing objects in these sentences actually are.
When a critic gives a description of a performance ‘that overwhelms. It reminds one that great acting is about transformation’ (Guardian), there is no obvious explanation for why, if it ‘overwhelms’, it should not also ‘remind’ that great acting is about something or other. The good griper is therefore likely to feel that those who form sentences on this model are ducking the effort and perhaps also the responsibility of being more specific.**
The lesson is a small one, but what strikes is that this particular form of misuse could be a subtly annoying feature of your campaign. Do, therefore, think of messing with transitivity: if you make this a habit, and then coincide it** with other assaults on Good English, it will surely contribute towards your desired end of overwhelming.**