Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the word impact as a verb and about the difference between sympathy and empathy. But first, thanks to all our Grammar-Pillusians, old and new, over on Patreon.

Your support is a huge help, and I love making all the little extras you get each week.

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A change I often make when I'm editing podcast scripts from other writers is to get rid of the word impact,

especially when it's being used as a verb, because I know it's a pet peeve for some listeners.

The American Heritage Dictionary says the word impact in the figurative sense of a dramatic effect

came under criticism in the 1960s.

The thinking usually goes like this.

Impact is fine as a noun, as in the California wildfires had a huge impact on air quality.

But as a verb, you should use it for only physical collisions or packing, as in scientists expect an asteroid

to impact Earth, or he hasn't impacted tooth.

So this means I hear from people who don't like sentences, such as the weather will impact

fourth quarter sales.

And it's a quick change to avoid annoying people by editing that

to the weather will affect fourth quarter sales. One reason people give for not liking impact as a

verb, meaning to affect something, is that they think it's new, that the noun impact has been

verbified. Impact was actually a verb before it was a noun,

going all the way back to the 1500s. But it's used to mean have an effect on something is newer,

only emerging in the early 1900s. Further, looking at how words have been used in the last

hundred years on Google's Ngram

viewer also explains why people feel like the verb is new. Google Ngram has this cool trick

where you can tag words by part of speech, so you can look at how often impact has been used

...