effort, v.

[Jonathan Lighter]

Arrrrggggghhhhh ! ! ! ! ! !   WORDS NO GOOD ! ! ! ! !

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: effort, v.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 3:27 PM -0400 9/2/05, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 12:20:51PM -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> Only once in human history, OED seems to say, has "effort" been
>>used a verb. AIn English, anyway. And then it meant to strengthen
>>or fortify.
>>
>> But all that seems to be changing, word-lovers.
>
> 2002 Chicago Tribune 9 Sept. I. 7/1 Can we effort to root out
> terrorists in the Middle East and yet give short shrift to
> terrorists here in the homeland?
>
>For example.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED

There are an even dozen apparent Nexis hits for "efforted", but most
are coach-speak occurrences of "out-efforted", including this one, in
which the coach was evidently a bit lexically insecure...

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio)
July 17, 1993 Saturday, FINAL / ALL

SECTION: SPORTS; Pg. 2D
HEADLINE: DETROIT DRIVES PAST THUNDERBOLTS
BYLINE: By AMY ROSEWATER; PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

DATELINE: RICHFIELD, O.

BODY:
Detroit had no intention of becoming the Cleveland Thunderbolts'
first victim at the Coliseum this season.

Like the four other opponents who have won here, the American
Conference-leading Drive left Richfield with a victory.

The Drive's 54-43 victory against the Thunderbolts last night in
front of 6,835 fans extended Cleveland's losing streak to five games,
and left the Thunderbolts still in search of their first victory at
home.

"It seems like over our three-year history, we're always fighting
Detroit hard," Thunderbolts coach Dave Whinham said. "We keep
creeping up on them, but ...

"No one is pleased with the fact that we lost, but I'm proud of our
players. There are situations where they out-executed us, but we
out-efforted them, if that's a word."

==========

But here's a different verbal "effort", with a more unpredictable
meaning. I always wondered what the lexical form for 'try to book on
a TV news show' was....

The Washington Post
April 23, 2002 Tuesday

SECTION: STYLE; THE TV COLUMN LISA DE MORAES; Pg. C07
HEADLINE: Exclusive Perks: CNN's Red-Carpet 'Get' in the Blake Story
BYLINE: Lisa de Moraes

CNN was the only place you could see Margerry Bakley, sister of
Robert Blake's slain wife, doing her victory lap yesterday when the
actor and his bodyguard were formally charged in the shooting
death on Bonny Lee Bakley.

CNN had locked Margerry Bakley up as its exclusive "get" for the
day; in return, the cable news network paid her airfare from
Knoxville, Tenn., to Los Angeles, put her up in a hotel and ferried
her
around in a limousine.

A CNN rep said she knew nothing about it, but according to two
reporters covering the arraignment, the driver seemed to be doubling
as a sort of handler -- no doubt to protect Bakley from the advances
of Fox News Channel, which acknowledged yesterday that it also had
tried to "reach out to her."

"She was unavailable to us. We're trying to book her for tomorrow,"
the Fox rep said.

MSNBC was strangely unaffected. "Nobody has efforted Margerry Bakley
here," a spokesman for the network said yesterday.

"Efforted" is TV news-speak for "tried to book someone on a show."

And why should they effort Margerry Bakley? She's only the sister of
the victim in what the cable news networks seemed yesterday to be
trying to make out to be the O.J. Simpson case of the
new millennium. She's also likely to be called as a witness and
she's spent the past year telling anyone who would listen -- even TV
Guide -- that Blake did it.

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