Travel_ as TRANS

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jun 7, 2011, at 11:21 AM, Brian Hitchcock wrote:

> -- "Pall Mall! Finer cigarettes! And...! They are *mild*! Their greater
> length *travels* the smoke farther, on the way to your throat!"
>
> -- "'Cloning' the drive will bring along the Restore partition, so it may be possible to travel the clone, with Restore partition, from Mac to Mac."
>
> It's not surprising that advertisers (in the 'cigarette' example) and IT
> nerds (in the 'cloning' example) misuse the verb 'travel'.  These groups are notorious for syntactic gaffes.  For these professions, it is indeed a "mild" misuse amid myriad manglings.  (Note also the extraneous comma after 'farther'.)

not a syntactic gaffe, though it obviously offends your sensibilities.  this is just a causativization of an intransitive; transitive 'travel' 'cause to travel'.

yes, lots of people object to certain (*certain*) causativizations, like "grow" in "grow the company" 'make the company grow'.   (it's a mystery to me who so many causativizations pass unnoticed, while others drive some people totally up the wall.)

and the comma after "farther" is a punctuational option, conveying a prosodic option.

> In addition, I have heard the verb 'travel' used as business jargon in regard to paper-based workflow, thus:
>
> "This new program will minimize the traveling of documents.".
>
> (The guy from whom I heard this works with me here in America, but he is Chinese by birth.)

this is just an -ing nominalization of intransitive "travel".  ok, it came to you in a business context, from a Chinese-born speaker.  how does that make it nasty?  (there's a subtle difference here between the noun "travel" and the noun "traveling", by the way.)

arnold

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