Paul,
This threat got me curious as well, so I
just tried googling “effect a cure” to
see what would happen, and got over 900 hits. Now, one cannot, of course, say
that the fact that a lot of people use an expression guarantees acceptance by
editors – I would guess that googling “alot” as one word (spell-check keeps trying to fix
that) would produce a large number of hits as well. However, the documents
using the expression include a court case from 1995 (http://www.law.cornell.edu/nyctap/I95_0112.htm)
, a university database page on Renaissance figures (http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/cardano.html)
and quite a few others that no one would class in the category of non-standard or colloquial writing, or deliberate “h4xx0rzsp34k.”
The phrase “effect an escape”
produced over 16,000 hits – the usage is apparently extremely common in
law enforcement, and shows up in documents produced by the Attorney General in
1995, among others (“Examples of this type of situation
include using explosives in order to effect an escape from prison or attempting
to disable a fire truck during a fire within an institution”; http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/readingroom/resolution14d.htm).
Even Attorneys General make mistakes, of course, but this was
from 1995, when the individual in question was still expected to know and even abide
by established precedents (sorry, simply could not resist that).
Judgment of a usage as “valid”
or not is complex, and sensitive to a wide range of sociopolitical factors, but
its occurrence in a large number of edited publications is at least relevant,
if not conclusive. There does seem to be a trend, though: “effect a cure”
seemed to generate more hits in documents related to earlier medical practices,
and “effect an escape” in legal contexts – which are
notorious for preserving archaisms. This may be a good example of a “Zombie
construction” – it’s undead. It keeps staggering about in
restricted locations, even if people try to put it down for good, but it isn’t
what anyone would call lively. Of course, tomorrow may bring us the “Clear
Welkin Initiative” from the EPA…...
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
From:
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007
7:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Comments?
Bill, et all,
Of course, we can
also make the welkin dance (indeed), Thy hounds can make the welkin anwer them
/ And fetch shrill echoes from the hollow earth, and sometimes hideous echoes
make the welkin howl. I suppose this thread has effected a response from me
among others, but whether that usage of 'effect' as a verb is acceptable by all
is out of my welkin entirely!
);--}
Paul D.
----- Original Message
----
From: "
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:12:29 PM
Subject: Re: Comments?
Peter,
I have seen the expression “effect a
cure” in connection to medicine before, and I’m fairly sure
I’ve seen “effect an escape” in regards to a jailbreak. The
verb is of quite limited usage, but it’s not quite as set a collocation
as things like “wreak havoc” or “make the welkin ring.”
-- Bill Spruiell
From:
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007
6:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Comments?
Am I right that "effect" as a
verb almost always takes "change" as an object? Other than a
change, what else can one effect?
Peter Adams
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