“Gift” was a noun before it was a verb. I cling to this historic fact somewhat vainly because I have resisted the drift of the word “gift” into verb territory. My resistance marks me, I think, as something of a curmudgeon. But I want to try to make a case for my preference to leave our gifts in the noun basket, and to stick with “give” as a verb.

I have it on good authority that the use of “gift” as a verb does, indeed, go back centuries, and that it is not just some recent push from marketing departments. But still, I cringe when I hear someone say that something was “gifted” to them. What’s wrong with “given?” I want to ask. But then I realize that nobody asked me what I think.

When I examine my linguistic preference for the verb “to give” rather than the verb “to gift” - which doesn’t sound right, does it? - and I look for something other than stubbornness, I do find a reason to hang on to “giving” rather than “gifting.” It has to do with the fact that “gift” remains a noun, and a deeply meaningful noun at that. It is enormously important to know a gift when you see one (or have given or received one). My concept of the “economy of giftedness” is premised on the assumption that everything we have in this life is a gift, and the concept is meant to remind us of something that’s easily forgotten. We often convince ourselves that the things we have, from trees to T-shirts, are things we have earned or deserve, or have a right to, or something. But I want to assert that everything we have, from cows to cufflinks, is really gift that somehow has flowed to us from hand of God, including rain and radiators. In my view, it takes a force of will to remind ourselves of the category of gift as the primary characteristic of everything we have, from dirt to drills. “Gift” is a noun of extraordinary importance.

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And because “gift” is such an important noun, when we turn the word into a verb, it stays closely connected to the noun. When we say that something has been “gifted,” whether we mean to our not, we are deriving the meaning of the action from the thing itself. When we say that we are “gifting,” we are hyper-focused (whether we mean to be or not) on the thing, on the object, which, in our consumer society, has probably been purchased.

But when we say that something has been “given,” we are deriving the meaning of the action by the intention of the person who is doing the giving, and locating giving as a sublime human activity that may or may not involve an actual object. The tired cliché that it’s the thought that counts, was meant to convey something of the importance of giving, but it came to imply a kind of failed effort that came close but didn’t quite achieve its aims (most likely because somehow the gift was not considered good enough to actually express the intention of the giver).

Giving matters. If I want to share my love with you, I am going to give it to you; I am going to give myself to you; I am probably not going to gift myself to you. In the event, I might also give you box of chocolates, or a bouquet of flowers, but it’s the giving of my love that I want you to know, the object is accompaniment. Above all, the category of love reminds us that the image and likeness of God is most apparent in us when we are giving. When we are gifting, we have probably been to the mall. But when we are giving, we are probably face to face, or hand in hand, or arm in arm, or locked together in some yet more wonderful physical embrace.

The older I get, the more comfortable I become with the possibility of turning into a curmudgeon. But I hope that my small campaign to prefer giving over gifting is grounded in more than stubborn personal preference. I hope it is grounded in the insight that at our best, human beings are givers, and we all have a need to give, and much of the most wonderful giving we ever do will have nothing to do with any physical object or thing, since the greatest gift we can give to each other is our love.