Gift (noun): A thing given willingly to someone without payment
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Anonymous
FB is not an adjective. A facebook is a noun, and means a book distributed to first year college students, with photos to help them identify their new classmates during orientation period and afterward. |
Anonymous
FB is being used as a proper noun, and proper nouns are often used as adjectives: "I have a Wisconsin friend". This is known as a proper adjective (for reals!). |
Anonymous
Interesting, since culturally gifts are pretty much never disinterested. They are more often a sign of good will offered in expectation of getting good will back. In other cases I believe they are essential to a culture's economy (remember some anthropology film about a particular group of people whose entire lifestyle is defined around throwing really lavish parties which include giving their material wealth to everyone else besides a lot of eating and drinking). Or gifts given to a god or king as a sign of, hm, submission?? ("What is mine is not really mine, because You o Lord own everything"?) But in a legal sense, the SCOTUS point would simply be that no, you cannot expect to prevail if you try to sue to get something back as a result of giving something as a gift. |
Anonymous
Nouns are often verbed. And a facebook meant what I said it meant. An actual hard cover book with black and white photos. Language changes. |
Anonymous
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https://www.grammarly.com/blog/the-basics-of-verbing-nouns/
Throughout history, verbs have entered the English language through nouns; in fact, the first instance of the word verbification dates to 1871. The process follows a reliable pattern: a verbification is introduced, people use it, the media picks it up, and it becomes part of our lexicon. Today, the following verbs-born-from-nouns are commonplace: Chair, cup, divorce, drink, dress, fool, host, intern, lure, mail, medal, merge, model, mutter, pepper, salt, ship, sleep, strike, style, train, voice It might be difficult to imagine these words only as nouns now, but there was a time when that was the case. For example, the earliest known usage of “to medal” appeared in a newspaper in 1966, but “medal” was first recorded as a noun in 1578. It can be argued that the time it takes to verbify a noun is becoming shorter, which causes some people to protest. For example, to Google was named “the most useful word of 2002” and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, although Google had been around since 1997. Compared to the 388 years it took for medal to be verbified, Google’s five years are meager. |
Anonymous
Actually, it's been used as a verb for a few centuries. But if it bothers you, just don't use it as a verb! https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/gift-as-a-verb |
Anonymous
To give is to give freely without expectation of anything, and that includes a thank you. |