Is ‘mourning’ broken?

“Friends and family mourn Michael Jackson.” All the mournful headlines got Sarah Jensen, a writer and editor, wondering about the way the verb is used. “Should this properly be ‘mourn the death of’?” she asked in an e-mail.

To mourn someone (not just for someone) sounded fine to me - but what do I know? I only recently learned that not all dictionaries record lag as a transitive verb; lag behind, redundancy and all, is preferred. And there are quarrelsome factions debating other transitivity issues: Approve an ad, or approve of it? Advocate a policy, or advocate for its beneficiaries?

I’m happy to report, though, that mourn gives us no cause for conflict. The verb can be intransitive: Blessed are they that mourn (Matthew 5:4); No longer mourn for me when I am dead (Shakespeare). Or it can be transitive, with the person (she mourns her father) or the loss (he mourns her absence) as object of the verb. Or a clause can be the object: The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Defoe’s “Moll Flanders” (1722): “I seem’d not to Mourn that I had committed such Crimes {hellip} but {hellip} that I was to be punish’d for it.” All these variants go back centuries; even “Beowulf” has both transitive and intransitive uses of mourn.

In the 19th century, that hotbed of nitpicking, there does seem to have been some thought of complexifying the mourn situation. The 1828 Webster’s Dictionary entry hints that objections to transitive mourn have been raised. Though the word means “to grieve for; to lament,” says Webster’s, “there is an ellipsis of for, the verb not being transitive. When we say, we mourn a friend or a child, the real sense and complete phrase is, we mourn for a friend, or mourn for the loss of a friend. ‘He mourn’d his rival’s ill success,’ that is, he mourned for his rival’s ill success.” But the 1913 edition of the dictionary doesn’t mention the matter; it simply records the transitive verb - using the same quote, from Richard Sheridan - without objection. A century later, mourn is as adaptable as ever, transitive or not as our needs and wishes dictate.

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MAVEN RAVIN’: My recent reference to “usage mavens” brought two queries from readers asking what exactly I meant by maven. “I have never heard anyone use this word in conversation,” e-mailed one of them. “What does it mean? Why use it?”

It may not come up often in everyday chat, but maven has been increasingly popular in word circles since William Safire adopted the label in 1982, a few years after launching his New York Times language column. “I am a language maven - a word that means less than an expert but more expert than an enthusiast or an aficionado,” he wrote. And in 1993, he published a collection of his columns with the title “Quoth the Maven.”

The following year, the word got a further boost from Steven Pinker, whose best-selling book “The Language Instinct” included a chapter on usage scolds called “The Language Mavens.” Pinker didn’t agree that the title was deserved - “Maven, schmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it,” he said - but his use surely helped establish maven as a standard term for self-taught, nonacademic usage commentators. As Yiddishisms go, maven is doing quite well in English; a Nexis search of major newspapers shows that it’s roughly 10 times as common as klutz and tush, and more than three times as common as schmooze and mensch. You may not need it in your vocabulary, but for some of us, maven more than earns its keep.

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HIGH AND DRY: I’m always pleased to hear a novel usage problem, even if it turns out not to be all that problematic. So thanks to Mark Lussky, who recently e-mailed to tell me that the verb strand was being horribly abused. “News repeaters from California to Pennsylvania do not hesitate to describe the boater who runs out of gas or is otherwise disabled on the water as one who has become stranded,” he wrote. “Nothing could be less accurate, of course, as the boater is not on the strand at all. The word means beach or shore or bank.”

In other words, historically stranded is like beached - it means “run aground, high and dry.” But does the literal sense still rule today, when we no longer use strand to mean shore, beach, landing? Not really; stranded has been used metaphorically for some 200 years. The current American Heritage gives the definition, “To bring into or leave in a difficult or helpless position: The convoy was stranded in the desert.” I understand how an etymologically educated sailor might be annoyed to find stranded becoming a synonym for “adrift.” But that boat sailed, figuratively speaking, a long time ago.

E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas.