| mike ( @ 2005-04-07 15:10:00 |
Migratory grammar
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I am connected in the second degree with a guy at work (Richard) who has done work with the Microsoft Word grammar checker. He forwarded me an email whose subject was "strange grammar complaint from Word." Someone had run the grammar checker over this sentence:
How do we migrate the current mess to something new?
and reported "The word 'migrate' is underlined and the error message is 'verb confusion'."
When Richard sent me the email, he asked: "How many speakers of English do you suppose there are who use 'migrate' as a transitive verb? Are there any outside of the technology industry?"
This usage is so common in my field that I think I would not have blinked. We constantly talk about "migrating applications," meaning converting applications, with the specific meaning of moving either from one version to another or from one platform to another.
(Computer people - or hell, maybe English speakers at large -- like to transitize verbs all the time anyway. Another common one I see about 12 times a day is "to persist," in the sense of "to store": "The data is persisted to disk," for example.)
But I pondered Richard's question and did some looking about. Lo and behold, this usage is interesting enough that the good folks at MacMillan are tracking it and featured it once upon a time as their Word of the Week:
The nice twist is that this supposed new transitive usage is, whaddya know, a throwback:
Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy
I am connected in the second degree with a guy at work (Richard) who has done work with the Microsoft Word grammar checker. He forwarded me an email whose subject was "strange grammar complaint from Word." Someone had run the grammar checker over this sentence:
How do we migrate the current mess to something new?
and reported "The word 'migrate' is underlined and the error message is 'verb confusion'."
When Richard sent me the email, he asked: "How many speakers of English do you suppose there are who use 'migrate' as a transitive verb? Are there any outside of the technology industry?"
This usage is so common in my field that I think I would not have blinked. We constantly talk about "migrating applications," meaning converting applications, with the specific meaning of moving either from one version to another or from one platform to another.
(Computer people - or hell, maybe English speakers at large -- like to transitize verbs all the time anyway. Another common one I see about 12 times a day is "to persist," in the sense of "to store": "The data is persisted to disk," for example.)
But I pondered Richard's question and did some looking about. Lo and behold, this usage is interesting enough that the good folks at MacMillan are tracking it and featured it once upon a time as their Word of the Week:
Like its predecessor relating to birds and people, common collocates of the new sense of migrate are the prepositions from and to, so we talk about migrating from one format or system to another. Unlike its predecessor, the new migrate has a transitive realisation, for example Consumers are migrating their CD collections to computer music files. In Internet and computing domains, migrate is also used with a direct object to refer, for example, to the transfer of data from one database to another, or the movement of a website from one server to another. This process can be referred to by the derived noun migration, and the noun migrator is often used to refer to software that manages or facilitates the transfer process.(I particularly like "a transitive realisation.")
The nice twist is that this supposed new transitive usage is, whaddya know, a throwback:
Although the transitive use of migrate seems to be a new invention restricted largely to technical and computing domains, the adoption of the verb as a synonym for move or transfer is in fact just a return to the verb’s original meaning.Yay.