Word Court
Atlantic, The, September, 2007 by Barbara Wallraff
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JOEL BLUM, of Paris, France, writes: “I have no problem with the nouns fund-raising and fund-raiser—but what’s up with the verb fund-raise? When I saw it the other day on an ACLU Web page, I realized it was starting to seem familiar. But doesn’t normal English call for raise funds? Similarly, bartend and caretake. Are these verbs anomalies or errors?”
Anteaters eat ants, bookkeepers keep books, and cabdrivers drive cabs—so why indeed shouldn’t fund- raisers just raise funds and leave it at that? Then again, air conditioners air-condition rooms, babysitters babysit , and, at least according to some dictionaries , caretakers caretake . Maybe fund-raise and bartend belong to this category of verbs.
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Dictionaries aren’t especially helpful. They claim to present the language as it is currently used—but if that’s what they’re doing, you’d think they ...
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