"grieve"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Cf. "to weep," used transitively in roughly the same way since the ninth century.

  JL

"Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at UMR.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Cohen, Gerald Leonard"
Subject: Re: "grieve"
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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.
=20
Gerald Cohen

________________________________

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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=20

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