As in, “his retirement impacted Harper’s plans”? I’m not against it; I like neologisms as long as they don’t pervert old words (cf. “presently”) and are clearly intelligible. “Impact” is from impingere, which gave us “to impinge,” but maybe (as used) that’s not quite the same as “to impact” these days, so “to impact” fills a void. (I have nothing against using nouns as verbs in English, it’s what we do best.) “Impacted” seems less elegant to me but I guess if you have the verb you need the past participle. Maybe it’s a sore point, as it were, with me, as a couple of my wisdom teeth . . . impacted.

The OED is the best standard in dictionary’s exactly because it tracks every verifiable past and present usage.

You are perfectly welcome to attempt to claim the use of one word or another is improper – perhaps you will be successful in convincing people you are right. But if your only argument is to stuffily argue that it once meant something else you aren’t going to be successful.

With changing language even JM will admit that it might some day in the future be possible for the prae- beginning to allow a word to refer to something that is happening right now. We do not, however, live in the airy-fairy future, but the here-and-now of the present. We can therefore be quite certain that words from the stem of praesens never, ever refer to anything but that which is happening later.

Don’t imagine a luncheon invitation will be accepted by this person nor anyone else in government after this blog entry.

Also contemplate this:

In Canada, we don’t do “transparent” or “rigorous”. We do manufacture and manipulate

Stress Test: It’s Time for Transparency
Seeking Alpha/New York Times
May 7, 2009

“But it will also require transparent, rigorous analysis; candor with the public and investors; and a recognition that lots of debt heaped upon a pile of dubious assets has created a financial nightmare — it’s no more complicated than that.”

In Canada, we don’t do Transparent or Rigorous. We are force fed M&M’s by the media and our paid elected members of Parliament…. manufacture and manipulate…..and their patent lies about tax leakage.

See: http://caiti-online-media.blogspot.com/2007/04/to-finance-minister-flaherty-your-tax.html

Present (1), near at hand. (F.-L. O.F. present. = L. praesent-, stem of praesens, i.e. being in front or near. = L. prae, in front; -sens, for *es-ens, being, from root ES, to be. Cf. Absent. Der. present-ly; presence, sb., O.F. presence, L. praesentia.

So, you see, the key element is prae-, “in front of,” i.e. in front of you in time or narrative, not in front of your nose in the here-and-now. But feel free to offer your reasoned opinion, Scott in Ottawa.

I, for one, am disappointed to see that the Conservative talking points misuse the adverb “presently” which, as Kory Teneckye knows perfectly well, does not mean (at least in English) “at present” but rather either “shortly” / “in the immediate future” (“I will be with you presently”) or “soon afterwards” (“Presently, Arthur Currie came in”).

Surely Mr. Wouters’ tenure at Treasury Board deserves more than this feeble, ungrammatical effort.

I swear this type of trivial knowledge will get me far someday.

Woo-ters? or Wow-ters? or Wuh-ters?