Is it standard English? to disrespect, to partake in

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sat, 29 Apr 2000 Dfcoye at AOL.COM wrote:

> Among the words my students have at their disposal which I do not, are the
> verbs 'to disrespect' and 'to partake in', as in 'He is going to partake in
> the after-school activities this semester.'    I asked my class in History of
> the English Language how many could say this and find nothing odd about it,
> and about 90% said it was OK by them.   So the question is, has it crossed
> into standard English?  Would anyone dispute that 'to disrespect' has made it
> into the hallowed halls of acceptable speech?    I  decided a couple of years
> ago that the weight of numbers was against me on 'disrespect' and I don't

"Disrespect" as a verb has a distinguished pedigree (used, for example, by
Leigh Hunt and George Meredith) going back at least to the early 1600s.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2