Learn English – Use of “parley” meaning to convert

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I sometimes use the word "parley" as a verb effectively meaning "to convert from one language or system to another". Such as

Stargate parleys the Egyptian deities into villainous star-faring aliens.

I've been told this usage is incorrect, and I can't find any definition to support how I use it. Is there a similar word that means what I think it does, or am I totally off base?

Best Answer

The only verb sense of parley that I know or can find in dictionaries is intransitive: to parley with someone is to confer, hold talks, etc. with them. So to parley X into Y sounds wrong to me.

The usage I know which is much closer to your example is parlay, not parley. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

to use or develop (something) to get something else that has greater value

  • He hoped to parlay his basketball skills into a college scholarship.
  • She parlayed $5,000 and years of hard work into a multimillion-dollar company.

So the grammar of this absolutely fits your example. Your meaning doesn’t fit into M-W’s definition; but I would tend to agree with you that it’s now used a bit more broadly than their definition, generally as something closer to “to convert X into Y” or “to refashion/reimagine/reinterpret X as Y”.

Edit: The Corpus of Contemporary American English doesn’t reflect our feeling that it’s used more broadly: every instance of ‘parlay X into Y’ I checked fits the definition given by M-W. However, it does confirm that ‘parlay’ and ‘parley’ get mixed up fairly frequently — about 10% of the hits for each were in situations where, going by the dictionary definitions, it should have been the other.

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