Re: any intransitive verb can be transitived

Bob Cunningham wrote:
(K. Edgcombe) said:

I went to the doctor's surgery today, having previously made an
appointment. They have a jazzy new screen which says "To arrive for
your appointment, touch the screen". So (after a bit of trouble
with the notion that I hadn't already arrived) I touched it, and
went through a guessing game about my date of birth.... after which
it displayed a list of matching names (only one in my case), each
with a touch-button beside it.

The touch-button says "Arrive me".

Has this one been seen in the wild before?

i, for one, haven't seen it before either in the wild or in
the tame.

But there are words in English that probably seemed just as
strange the first time they were used. An example that
springs to mind is "schedule". Nowadays it's normal to say
things like "Please schedule me for a examination". But
"schedule" was an English noun for a few centuries before it
was first attested by the _Oxford English Dictionary_ in the
mid-19th century as a transitive verb with a person as
object.

Maybe "appointment" will have its turn soon, as in "Please
appointment me for an eye examination on Thursday". Or
maybe "Please appoint me for an eye examination".

A related case is the word "seize" as used by medical people
to mean "have a seizure". I don't find that in dictionaries
yet, but we were assured a few years ago by at least one
alt.usage.english poster that "seize" is indeed commonly
used that way by doctors and nurses.

Well, similarly to what has been said in the past -- do you want good English or good medicine?
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
http://www.geocities.com/opus731/

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