I recently read in a book about someone who "procrastinated her tax return", which seemed very strange to me. Is this usage common, and if so is it considered correct?
Learn English – Can “procrastinate” be a transitive verb
intransitive-verbstransitive-verbs
Related Solutions
There is an idiom to shop (something) around which means, more or less, to present (something) to a variety of potential buyers to see who will make the best offer for purchase. The example given, “to shop Teixeira” is just a truncated version of this idiom, dropping the around.
Some examples of this idiom from COCA:
- But how serious could he have been about leaving Sacramento if he didn't have a high-profile agent to shop him around the league, someone who might have bullied or bluff-ed the Kings into talling sign-and-trade with other teams?
- For a fee, his company will build a prototype and shop it around. If a corporation bites, Davison shares royalties with inventors.
- They get a good idea, shop it around, raise some capital, then sell it off to a bigger company
- Insurers sometimes shop patients around to a series of IMEs, flying them out of state and putting them up at motels.
- And how do you know if you're getting a fair shake? # " I always tell people to shop it around, " said Nedler. " Take it two or three places. You have to trust who you're dealing with.
The shortened version seems commonly used in a sports context:
- In fact, with the trade deadline coming up Monday, the Bears ought to shop him now and try to retrieve something in return.
- The idea, they said, was to be up front with free agent Monk during a time when he also could shop himself to the highest NFL bidder.
This truncated version possibly developed from cases like the first example above (shop him around the league), where the phrasal verb to shop ___ around was reanalyzed as a normal transitive verb to shop ___ that takes an optional prepositional phrase with around—as in around the league. Notice that the example shop patients around to a series of IMEs uses “around to”, which is what you’d expect with a phrasal verb.
This idiom is not the same idiom as to shop (a business) or to shop (a selection of products), which is what the other examples are. People definitely use shop in this way. Here are a few examples of this in COCA:
- Draw up a grocery list for the " big " holiday meal before you go shopping. Divide the list by section and shop the store in that order.
- Sam's Club stores are huge and carry not only electronics, but everything from auto accessories to food to pharmaceuticals... But: You may need to shop the store repeatedly to recoup the $35 annual membership fee.
- " We shop the farmers markets for amazing things like raw dates on the stem, red burgundy okra, romanesco, and saturn peaches, " says Holly Vesecky of Holly Flora in Los Angeles.
- I am a die hard fashionista and, you know, I shop the sales.
- Before he could ink a deal, he was automatically switched to TXU Energy... His price jumped 71 percent overnight, to 18.8 cents a kilowatt hour from 11 cents. " No way was I going to pay that, " says Mr. Dreese. He was able to shop the market and switch to another retailer for 13.3 cents a kilowatt hour.
To me, this idiom to shop ___ is different from to shop at ___ because it implies a slightly more intense sense of intention to the shopping.
Yes, there may be a distinction between "elaborate" used with a normal direct object and "elaborate on" used with a prepositional object: the former, where it is used, tends to mean "create, establish", whereas the latter tends to mean "give further details about". If you look at these examples from the Europarl corpus:
http://www.translationexamples.com/ex/en-fr/elaborate
you'll see examples such as:
"must outline a concrete strategy ... and elaborate a detailed investment plan"
where the implication does appear to be create a plan, not develop one already in existence, vs:
"elaborate a little on what you said".
where the idea is "go into more detail".
As an informal intuitive observation, I would have said that the first usage isn't very common. However, I did a quick check on Google ngram and the figures appear to belie my intuition:
If these figures are anything to go by, "elaborate on" appears to be a relatively recent innovation, vs a time when "elaborate" was practically always used with a 'straight' direct object.
Interestingly, as testimony to this being a relatively recent innovation, Websters 1913 edition doesn't appear to mention the possibility of "elaborate" with 'on', but gives the following definition and example of transitive 'elaborate':
"To perfect with painstaking; to improve or refine with labor and study, or by successive operations; as, to elaborate a painting or a literary work."
Best Answer
Transitive
In the 19th century and before, the transitive use of procrastinate in the sense ‘delay, postpone’ is quite frequent:
Over the course of the century, however, transitive procrastinate suffers a dramatic reduction in frequency, virtually disappearing by the 1960s, as this NGram suggests:
This usage, though now infrequent, could still make an appearance in 1953:
Note that this query will also result in false hits such as procrastinated the whole afternoon or “procrastinate. The” despite the claim that an NGram search is case-sensitive. Results after about 1945 are mostly of this nature. The modern use of transitive procrastinate is actually less than the graph would indicate.
Agent Noun
A procrastinator, someone who habitually delays completing expected tasks, is usually met with disapproval:
Procrastinators habitually procrastinate, and this action — or rather inaction — is intransitive.
Intransitive
Intransitive procrastinate means either putting off some task or merely stalling for time, today by far the more frequent usage of the verb:
Conclusion
To contemporary native speakers, many of whom will only be familiar with the intransitive “procrastinator” meaning of the verb, suddenly being confronted with a transitive procrastinate will likely seem grammatically incorrect or at best archaic. Certainly a revival of the transitive use should only be attempted in a higher register and not by forcing the intransitive to take an object. If you don’t want to do the dishes or clean out the basement, you’d best be advised to postpone, delay, or simply put off the task rather than procastinate the doing or cleaning.