Mind your language
'Talk about the transit of Venus,' said my husband the other morning, more by way of expostulation than invitation. I don't know what he was doing in the house at that time of day, but something on Woman's Hour was bound to set him off sooner or later, and since the first item was on transsexualism, it was sooner.
His gripe was not so much that a man who became a woman was apparently ipso facto obliged to divorce (indeed he seemed strangely interested in that snippet). What he objected to was the use of the word transition as a verb. It seems to be a commonplace of the transsexual 'community'.
I can see that most of the other transwords already have their semantic burdens loaded up, otherwise one might prefer transverse (or traverse) or transit itself. And there is no point complaining that -ition is a poor termination for a verb, because plenty of others thrive: position, condition, proposition. If men continue have bits cut off, we shall have to get used to hearing the verb transition.
I was going to try to write about try and this week, so let's be brisk. Try and instead of try to is common, ancient and used by the best writers. Milton in his well-known poem Paradise Lost says, 'At least to try and teach the erring soul'. The construction has, however, become something of a grammatical shibboleth, but I think we can rise above such dameschool prohibitions if we know what we are doing.
The and generally links two verbs in the infinitive form, as in the example from Milton. Because the inflexions of English verbs are so little varied, the construction can be widened to the linking of two verbs in the form of the infinitive (with no inflective suffix), even when the first is actually indicative: 'They try and teach'. It would be harder to use it after 'he tries', or in any past tense unless it involves the infinitive form ('he did try and teach'). But it's very familiar after an imperative: Try and be a good boy.'
An example quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary from Mrs Thrale scarcely seems to come into the same category: 'Do go to his house and thank him.' There, thank is more easily construed as an imperative than an infinitive.
Come and go are other verbs that allow this idiom, and why not? Old Fowler judged it not to be 'below the proper standard of literary dignity'. That sounds sufficiently ladylike for me.
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