Like so many hundreds if not thousands of English nouns, gift actually began as a verb but at some point a millennium ago was nouned only to be reverbed in the last century and now sits uncomfortably as both noun and verb. My guess it’ll be mostly a verb in a generation or two, since present, itself a nouned verb, has pretty much the same meaning as gift, and has the advantage of being bisyllabic, so the noun can have a different syllable stress than the verb, which to the ear makes them two completely separate words though the eye will wonder occasionally why they’re spelled the same.

English has the ability to render almost any noun into a verb simply through context—putting it in the sentence where a verb should be, and then adding whatever suffixes are required—gifting, gifted, gifts—by regular verb conjugation. And English can also turn verbs into nouns simply by dropping the conjugation and putting it in a sentence where a noun should be. Usually it’s just a temporary or even a one time only transformation, but then sometimes they stick. Gifting has stuck. But then so have many, perhaps even most English verbs. A lot of verbs in English would not be verbs at all if someone hadn’t had the urge to use it as a verb because there was no other way of expressing what one was actually doing with the noun. So you verbed the noun. Easy enough. Thus someone a thousand years ago, perhaps a Norman who didn’t know his Old English verbs anyway, used the correct English verb giften as a noun. Soon everyone was. And look what trouble it’s caused now.

A quick look through the dictionary (if you’re so inclined or bored enough to actually read a dictionary) will reveal an incredibly high proportion of our nouns have been verbs at some point and vice versa. Most languages can’t actually do so, their grammar rules are far too complex. But the language gods have gifted us with the ability to wantonly noun and verb our little brains out, and worse yet, be understood. All we can do is watch meanings shift right before our eyes. Or ears. Whatever.

Sorry there’s no more of the great gobs of prose I used to spill out all over these blogs. People have been asking. Alas, epilepsy was really fucking with the long essays, and I finally had to stop. Had to stop working too. Had to stop just about everything. It’s been a couple years now and the synapses have calmed down nicely. They seem to like being bored. Me not so much at first but I’ve adapted. So I write tiny little essays now, scarcely ever longer than a paragraph. Hence all this tinyness where vastness used to be. Little gems, I tell myself. The actual gemage might be debatable, but they’re my blogs. You can think everything you do is art if no one is editing you.

Anyway, thanks for reading and feel free to complain.

Brick

If I got this right, a polyp reproduces asexually, budding by cell division into little bumps that become tiny jellyfish that float about and grow and finally do some sort of jellyfish touchless fuck thing involving male jellyfish releasing vast hordes of sperm into the water and letting the little buggers find their way to a female jellyfish’s ovum which, once fertilized, gives birth to a cillia driven little squiggle which finds its way onto a surface somewhere to develop into another polyp and begin the cycle anew. Luckily for us, we aren’t descended from cnidarians, which is what jellyfish are, cnidarians. Instead we did the whole vertebrate thing, which is why love is not a many polyped thing.

So a couple days ago I was harvesting white hair algae from the fish tank. Amazing and annoying stuff, it begins to clump on a leaf or stalk with bunches of fine grey filaments and you have to either remove the leaf or yank a clump of the hairy stuff from a stalk until you’ve got a little pile of algae that looks more like the floor of a Leisure World barber shop than anything algal and slimy. It smells faintly of kelp, also an algae, but a mega algae. In comparison these white hair algae are maybe an inch or two long. Yet apparently these white hair algae are actually a community of algae species, each filament a towering algal skyscraper, like a tiny stromatolite waving in the current.

But I digress.

Removing the algae stirred up the Gordian knot of plants floating in the center of the tank, a mass of interconnected triffids rising from thin stalks anchored in the gravel to take over their known universe. Suddenly, almost like magic, a tiny little fish appeared. An infant platy. Uh oh. It should have had two or three or even four dozen siblings. There should be a whole herd of tiny fishlings. But this little guy seemed utterly alone. For the week prior all the other fish had been giving unusual attention to the eddies and recesses in that mass of plants. Now I know why. They’d been stalking baby prey. A piscicidal massacre. Even the orange platys, both mom and dad, had pitched into the feast, eating more than their share, devouring their own DNA and shitting it out again, any chance of their own evolution stopped cold. Now that’s a Darwin Award. Literally eating their own. Sick little fucks, fish.

The surface it is standing on would be, I assume, the interior of the exterior of a bacterium, being that bacteriophage viruses invade and then replicate within bacteria, taking proteins from the bacteria to create copies of itself. Sounds creepy, though the influenza virus does the exact same thing, using our cells instead of a single cell bacterium. From a virus’s unthinking and barely even alive POV, a cell is a cell. What matters is the proteins in the cell, without which there can be no baby viruses.