"grieve"

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

     The NPR usage looks like a sort of syntactic blend: "mourn (smb)". + "grieve for (smb.)". The two expressions evidently became confused in the speaker's mind.
 
Gerald Cohen

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From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Charles Doyle
Sent: Mon 2/26/2007 3:19 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "grieve"



Last week a voice on NPR was describing the situation in the movie _The Queen_: "All of England was grieving Princess Diana." That transitive use of "grieve" sounds odd to me, but I believe it's pretty common nowadays, perhaps emulating the grammar of the somewhat synonymous "mourn" (one can either mourn FOR or simply mourn a person who has died). OED, s.v. "grieve" verb.8b, has "trans. To feel or show grief at or for; to regret deeply. poet," with citations from 1598 to 1871.  Only the latest, from Browning, has a human object, and it isn't an individual: "Nor any clipt locks strew the vestibule, Though surely these drop when we grieve the dead."

There's also a jurisprudential (and academic) use of "grieve"--both transitive and intransitive--that I've been noticing in recent years, which is absent from the OED: 'file or pursue a formal grievance (against)'. OED gives "griever" (4): "one who has a grievance," from 1830, labeling it a nonce-use. Googling "grieve" + "grievance" will show examples of this "grieve."

Charlie

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