John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: ‘Verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed — but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life.’
‘When and why did “progress” become a verb, as in “Let’s progress this development”?’ he wonders. ‘Probably about the same time as “impact”.’ But it is not difficult to discover that this speculation is wrong. Progress, having had a successful career as a noun since the early 15th century, took up a vacancy as a verb in the 16th; Shakespeare uses it. If Mr Humphrys’s hatred is not, as he first implied, of a noun recently turned verb, is it of progress newly used transitively (that is, with an object)? No, for progress, as in ‘progress this development’, has been so used since 1875 or earlier. The first citation in the OED refers to ores being progressed in a process, but less material objects are evident too. Nevil Shute was happy to write, ‘Progress the design and construction of the factory.’
What of impact? That too is an old word with several strands of meaning. The dictionary, no constant friend of Mr Humphrys, tells us it is indeed found earliest as a verb, not a noun. I’m not sure if Mr Humphrys is equally repelled by transvestite verbs donning nominal clothes. Here again, his real distaste seems to be for the transitive usage. Of that the OED provides an example from 1945, when Mr Humphrys was just interrupting his parents with his first lisping words.
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