@Brus - I've no doubt your granny got 'gift' as a verb from Scotland, as the OED refers to its use as a verb as 'chiefly Scottish'.

I'm sure Churchill meant 'action' as a noun; I imagine its use as a verb postdates him quite a bit. On the other hand it's not that new, especially in business contexts - 'I would like you to action this as soon as possible', i.e. put into action' (slightly different, I'd suggest, from 'deal with' - you can deal with things that crop up, such as problems, but you action things like plans: things that have been decided) - at least it has the advantage of brevity.

People have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries, or as they say at efl.about.com 'Verbing is a time-honored way of coining new words out of old ones'. Does anyone nowadays really worry about 'to chair a meeting', 'to host a dinner party', 'to file something', 'to access a file' or 'to contact somebody'. Then there's 'pencil somebody in', 'pen a little ditty', 'salt something away', 'pepper the conversation with verbification', 'ship the goods', 'just Google it' or 'we could microwave it'.

And what about all those verbs made from nouns from body parts - 'hand sb sth', 'face the wind', 'shoulder the responsibility' etc?

The real problem with verbs like 'action' and 'impact' is that they are new and unfamiliar; we happily accept examples of verbification that out grandparents found strange. The other thing is that it is quite personal: 'action' and 'impact' don't bother me particularly, but I'm not so keen on 'incentivise', although I've now just about got used to 'prioritise', mainly because it's in all the business English books I have to use. And again they're shorter than 'give somebody an incentive' and 'give something priority', and some commenters on this forum seem very keen on reducing the number of words we use (although I'm not one of them).

@Colin Hammond - Well, there's a blast from the past - from roughly the same period so does Melanie in Lay Down (candles In The Rain), although she does hedge her bets in the chorus - Lay down lay down, lay it all down - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSvTf65eM-E

There's also this compilation video with 'correct' and 'incorrect' uses of lay and lie in songs. It's quite good, but he doesn't seem to realise that 'lay' in Chasing Cars is the past of 'lie' being used in a hypothetical conditional, not the present of 'lay' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA_eZQ6mKgs&feature=related

Correction - I've just realised that I made one basic mistake in my explanation. In the examples I gave, there weren't two prepositions, with expressions like 'keep on to', 'hand in to' the first particle is an adverb, not a preposition, and these verbs are simply phrasal verbs, not prepositional verbs, an example of which would be 'look for' or 'deal with'. Although in modern parlance, three-part phrasal verbs like 'lead on to' are sometimes referred to as phrasal-prepositional verbs.

@Chris B - I think you're absolutely right about 'everyday' and 'maybe'; you see these sort of things quite a lot in comments columns. And I quite agree that this is probably more of a native-speaker problem, like 'their / they're / there', 'your / you're' and 'must of' for 'must have'. Native-speaker grammar sites are full of warnings about these, but I haven't noticed foreign learners make the same mistakes.

Mind you, we all make typos now and then, and I seem to remember being pulled up at least once in these pages for a stray 'it's' masquerading as an 'its'. But that is more to do with carelessness than ignorance, and most of us are guilty of that from time to time.

We could also add 'your arms' to your list. 'This gets a lot of attention in the States especially, where the difference between transitive 'lay' and intransitive 'lie' gets drummed into young people. The 'traditional' rule being that when you lay something down, you are using a transitive verb (a verb which takes an object) and when you lie down, you are using an intransitive verb (you can't lie anything down, only lie down).

Some people, again I think especially in the States, draw the conclusion from this that 'lie is for people and lay is for things', but then, of course, we have the classic children's bedtime prayer - 'Now I lay me down to sleep' - which follows the transitive rule, but not the 'lay is for people' rule.

There are a couple of problems here. Firstly, 'lay' is also the past form of 'lie', and that can confuse people, as is witnessed by the number of people on internet forums who think the line in Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars - 'If I lay here, would you lie with me and forget the world', is grammatically incorrect, something I disagree with - http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-think-snow-patrol-got-it-spot-on.html

The other thing is that 'lay' has been used intransitively for centuries, and apparently from about the 15th century till the 17th century, nobody bothered much. It was only when the prescriptivist grammarians started poking their noses everywhere that it became a problem - there's a good explanation at Merriam-Webster - look at the Usage discussion - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lay

And of course it's been used by writers, poets and songwriters for years - Bob Dylan's 'Lay Lady Lay' - with the line 'Lay on my big brass bed' is only one of the more recent examples. Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Common Usage quotes Laurence Sterne (Sentimental Journey 1768) as having written 'But Maria laid in my bosom', which one critic attacked saying that readers must 'conclude that Maria was the name of a favourite pullet'!

MWDEU end(s) with a quote from Dwight L.Bolinger, author of 'Language - The Loaded Weapon':

'Many people use lay for lie, but certain others will judge you uncultured if you do. Decide for yourself what is best for you.'

And I would add 'and learn to relax about other people's usage'. These things are as much personal or regional as about correctness. For example, I introduced a sentence earlier with 'Firstly', which is quite standard in British English, but which people seem to frown on in the States. I seem to often prefer 'different to' to 'different from' (again quite standard in BrE) but it seems to annoy the hell out of some people. On the other hand you will never hear me use the word 'awesome' where no sense of awe is involved. That I confess does niggle me - it's mainly a generational and cultural thing (I'm pensioner-age British) - but I'm getting used to it. And as it is now the most common meaning, I would be stupid to think of it as somehow 'incorrect'. These are just personal foibles; we can all decide what language we prefer to use, but what other people say is their own business, not something for us to worry about too much. IMHO.

I'm minded (reminded) of the famous (for older people in the UK, and fans of Birmingham City Football Club) Harry Lauder WW1 music hall song - 'Keep Right on to the End of the Road'.

'https://www.google.com/search?q=%22keep%20right%20on%20to%20the%20end%20of%20the%20road%22'

But of course it turns out that there's at least one chump (a Scotsman who should know better - Lauder was Scots) who has recorded it as 'Keep Right onto the End of the Road' - but nobody's really putting anything 'onto' the end of the road, are they?

I haven't seen confusion between preposition 'to' and infinitive 'to', but as Brus says, that should be easy enough to explain (provided people know what a to-infinitive is).

I think Brus's second type of example - 'he carried on to Rome' - is more likely to cause confusion, because here we have two prepositions, and I'm pretty sure I've seen this happening. I think we would also keep the two prepositions separate in these examples:

'Let's pass on to the next subject'
'He is slow at catching (or cottoning, or latching) on to new ideas'
"You need to hand it in to the teacher'
'When you've finished with it, hand it on to the next person'
'We need to keep on to the end of this road'

As foreign learners will well know (but native speakers might well not) these are all phrasal verbs, in these cases, specifically prepositional verbs. The verb in 'he carried on to Rome' isn't 'carry' (what did he carry?), but 'carry on'. That's one way of explaining it.

The other is that 'in' and 'on' here aren't about physical position or physical movement - when you hand something 'on to' somebody or 'in to' somebody, you don't physically put it 'onto' them or 'into' to them, we are using 'on' and 'in' metaphorically here.

You can find lists of these verbs at Wiktionary:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_phrasal_verbs_with_particle_%28in%29
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_phrasal_verbs_with_particle_%28on%29

But sometimes similar looking verbs have a literal meaning as well as a metaphorical one. For example 'lead on to' is sometimes used to mean 'result in'. Macmillan Dictionary gives this example - 'Prout's work on digestion led on to studies of proteins and fats.'

But we can also say 'The French windows in the living room lead onto the garden', where there is a physical meaning. At a British local government website there is a piece headed:

'Launch success leads onto Streetwise training'
(http://www.suffolkcoastal.gov.uk/news/launch-success-leads-onto-streetwise-training/)

Basically, the launch of a new campaign was so successful that the council are rolling out 'Streetwise' training sessions. In this case, there is no physical meaning, and 'leads on to' is a three-part phrasal verb meaning 'has resulted in', so I personally would write 'leads on to', as in this example from the NYT:

'her shrewd and happy argument that a generous policy of tolerance and inclusion leads on to success and prosperity.'

Even more interesting(ly), when you Google 'leads on to better things', it asks you you if you mean 'leads onto better things', which for me is not correct. Actual figures on Google are:

lead on to better things - 121 - lead onto better things - 65
leads on to better things - 48 - leads onto better things - 37
led on to better things - 30 - led onto better things - 15

At Google books 'leads on to success' gets about 15 hits, 'leads onto success' just one. There are similar results for 'leads on to (onto) better' with only one for the latter, although interestingly it's from 1912, so this is hardly a new phenomenon. Its an advertisement for 'The Early Educator' :

'If studiously followed, leads onto better returns for efforts exercised'

@Proper Usage - well, specifically in answer to porsche's question, here are a couple of examples:

1. AWS - Amazon Web Services. In a book called Electric Beanstalk, they explain that this is 'one of Amazon AWS's services'. They then use AWS's four times in the book, although they seem to avoid it on their own website (aws.amazon.com):

http://books.google.pl/books?id=hTPaVC6KcQAC&q=aws%27s#v=snippet&q=aws%27s&f=false

2. AHS - Alberta Health Services - In an editorial, the Calgary Herald write 'AHS’s new benchmarks must improve reporting, not obscure it'

http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Editorial+benchmarks+must+improve+reporting+obscure/8959340/story.html

3. IMLS - Institute of Museum and Library Services - on their own website they invite people to 'Submit Your Ideas on IMLS's Strategic Plan'

http://www.imls.gov/submit_your_ideas_on_imlss_strategic_plan.aspx

These were the only organisations I could find in the first five pages or so of Google which both had Services in the name and used initialisms.

@Chris Beaver - you were unlucky to land on a page where at least two other English teachers are commenting, and I'm sorry if my previous comment was a bit brusque. Apropos your comment on workéd, when my EFL students do that I tell them only Shakespeare is allowed to pronounce it that way. They seem to quite like that.

Hi Richard, some words can definitely take both, but I would probably read 'there's substantial evidence against him' as meaning a lot of evidence, and 'there's substantive evidence against him' as meaning important evidence.

The same would go for change:

'There have been substantial changes in the law on drink-driving' - a lot of changes
'There have been substantive changes in the law on drink-driving' - important changes (though not necessarily a lot)

Looking at various dictionaries, it seems to me that the use 'substantive' is pretty well restricted to the 'important' meaning, and I'd never use it for 'a lot of',. But there does seem to be a bit of crossover with 'substantial' when it comes to 'important'.

'There is substantial agreement between the company and the unions' could go either way, perhaps, but I could presumably then add 'but the substantive question of redundancies has still to be addressed'.

I confess, however, that 'substantive' is not a word I ever use, and I'm only going by what the dictionaries say, so I bow to your better judgement.