The evolution of English is fascinating—and sometimes bewildering.

A July 18 New York Times story included this sentence:

“Prosecutors have been asking witnesses about the former president’s state of mind, as well as efforts to fund-raise off his false claims of widespread voter fraud and whether he knew he had lost.”

The use of “fund-raise” in that sentence as a verb stopped my reading.

Why would The New York Times, the one-time employer of Theodore Bernstein, author of The Careful Writer and Watch Your Language, use that verb form? What happened to “raise funds”?

When I started my journalism career in the early 1970s, nonprofit organizations and politicians regularly “raised funds.” Churches, for example, ran capital “fundraising” campaigns (an adjective from the transitive verb and direct object). Political candidates scheduled campaign “fundraisers” (a noun that again combined the verb with the direct object).

At first, “fundraising” and “fundraiser” were hyphenated in The Associate Press Stylebook. Once the usage became more common, the two compound forms evolved into single words.

Since 2010, I noticed the backward formation of the noun “fundraiser” into the verb “fund-raise” among my undergraduate students at Virginia Tech. The logic of their word usage was clear. Their word pattern followed the common practice among English speakers of turning nouns into verbs.

But why would anyone need to turn a noun into a new verb when English already had the idea of raising funds—the verb-object combination that led to “fundraiser” in the first place? My students repeatedly indicated that they had never heard of “raising funds.” They “fund-raised” in their student clubs. “Raising funds” sounded strange to them.

Writers at The New York Times may now think the same way. My reaction to what I see as unnecessary language evolution may indicate that I am channeling “Miss Thislebottom,” a Bernstein character known for outmoded rules of English usage. I am getting older.

Copyright © 2023 Douglas F. Cannon