In a fit of insomnia, I was just taking a stroll through Jeremy Freeze's list of "most despised words," and I stumbled on that old favorite: impact as a transitive verb. As I am sure you know, a transitive verb requires a direct object, so this use of impact would be something like the following from a recent CBS News story:

These differences will persist whatever the economy does, and insofar as the president impacts the economy over the short-run it has more to do with things like Clinton's deft intervention in the Mexican peso crisis that have little relationship to the main ideological divide in the country.

Why this construction so annoys people eludes me, but it annoys a lot of people. According to The American Heritage Book of English Usage, 95% of the Usage Panel disapproved of this use of the word.

Nevertheless, the BEU states:

It's unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it can't be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, and its figurative use dates from 1935, allowing people plenty of time to get accustomed to it. It may be that its frequent appearance in jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, military officials, and financial analysts has made people suspicious. Nevertheless, the use of impact as a verb has become so common in corporations and institutions that younger speakers have begun to regard it as standard. It seems likely, therefore, that the verb impact will eventually become as usual as the verb contact has become over the last 30 years.

Let's speculate about the staying power of the anti-impact bias among highly educated Americans. Surely we cannot ascribe the bias to inherent cacophony. People who feel strongly on this issue claim that this construction hurts their ears, but this must be a learned response. Actually, the persistence of the common usage may be attributable to the beneficial tonal qualities of the word: "affects" simply doesn't have the same force.

My hunch is that the anti-impact bias is nothing more than a contrivance used to distinguish elite from common English speakers. The fact that the disfavored usage appears frequently in "jargon-riddled remarks" suggests that people who are speaking the common tongue are more prone to use "impact" in this way. By extension those who proclaim their disdain for this usage can (further) separate themselves from the commoners. Despising "impact" as a transitive verb becomes sort of a password for admission to the club of elite practitioners of the English language.

One piece of evidence: James Rosenfield writes: "Using 'impact' as a transitive verb conveys a sort of bland, ignorant business school sensibility, MBA's gone wrong (if that's not redundant), and that in itself is enough to get your teeth gnashing." If you want more evidence of elitism in the air, search "hate impact as a verb" in Google and knock yourself out.

Now, I don't intend this as a personal attack on Jeremy, whom I have never met (despite the fact that his office is just over Bascom Hill from mine). He has a great blog, which I enjoy reading, and, frankly, there are a lot worse "isms" in the world than language elitism. But after a lifetime of listening to this complaint, I felt moved to defend "impact" against yet another -- in my view, unjustified -- attack.

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