Does ‘nestled’ offend you?

‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass.

I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive voice (“nestled in the rolling Cotswold landscape” etc), perhaps I could persuade you to inveigh against this widespread abuse.’

I began by asking my husband why he found the usage so shocking. He said something about it resembling sat as in ‘sat in the corner, the child surveyed the room’. But nestled has long been established even as an attributive adjective: Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in 1856 of ‘little naked feet drawn up the way/ Of nestled birdlings’.

Centuries earlier, the transitive verb had been used in the passive with the meaning ‘settled’. ‘My life was nestled/ In the summe of happinesse,’ wrote the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell in a poem published shortly after his martyrdom in 1595.

An example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1990 comes close to the reviled abusage: ‘Nestled amid the rugged peaks of the Chilean Andes, the elusive cathedral stands of the alerce cedar, Fitzroya cupressoides, are found in the Southern Hemisphere’s last intact expanses of temperate rain forest.’ There is plenty of intransitive nestling too, as in a 19th-century example: ‘The country-houses of planters… nestling in orange groves.’Nestle is a verb ending in -le with a frequentative or a diminutive sense that goes back to Old English. If I understand the objection it is to nestling that resembles the cloying language of menus and restaurant reviews: ‘The chunky haddock fillet was nestled in a bed of sea-fresh mussels and steamed chard in a pool of delicate, boozy cream sauce’ – that sort of thing.