The Snarky Descriptivist strikes again!

Y’all know me, right? I’m the snarky descriptivist.

So. In my usage, the words rent and borrow have distinct and non-overlapping meanings. If I rent a book, I pay for the time between taking it and returning it. If I borrow a book, I do not pay at all. This is true for cars as well—if I am not paying, it is not a rental but a loan. Money is different—I borrow money and then pay interest, which is very like renting money if you think about it, but money is fungible and one doesn’t pay back the actual dollar bills one borrows, so loans of money are something different. Or is that not the difference—I might refer to borrowing a cup of sugar, with the intent of returning an entirely different cup of sugar, the crystals themselves being fungible just like dollar bills. On the other hand, I do find the borrow phrasing odd in that context, perhaps because I live in such an world of affluence that if a neighbor ran out of sugar and I had a sack, I would just give the sugar away and not expect a returned amount of sugar, rather a general goodwill and perhaps reciprocal kindness when I run out of flour.

Anyway.

I believe the usage is changing. My experience (confirmed by the experience of other library workers) is that Kids These Days are perfectly happy to use rent where I would only use borrow. In fact, for a loan without payment, it seems to me that rent has become the preferred usage for young persons—I would have to actually clock it, but it seems to me that I hear rent more frequently than borrow when students ask for reserve books or laptops.

And it gets right up my nose.

Ooh! No, you can’t rent a book. You can borrow a book. Unless you want to pay us money, which frankly we could use, so cough it up, rent-boy.

I don’t say that.

Anyway.

What I’m saying, as a snarky descriptivist, is that I believe that the usage is changing, and that my insistence on the non-overlapping spaces for rent and borrow is not un-like insisting on fewer rather than less for countable items, or requiring people to follow the imaginary that/which distinction. The language changes, and that is in general a Good Thing, and I am far too steeped in my own usage patterns to be able to tell whether my resistance to any particular change is irritating because it is change or is irritating because ZOMYFUCKINGSHIT it’s a fucking library, get it? You don’t have to fucking pay!

Ahem. Unless you return it late, of course.

Anyway.

Is the change because of Netflix? The return to the subscription library format, where you pay for membership but not for individual items as they are borrowed taken out? Do people talk about renting from Netflix these days? I can’t remember, back when I was paying them a monthly fee, whether I described what I was doing as renting or borrowing, or how they referred to it on their website. I know that iTunes and Amazon describe paying for a temporary license to view streaming video as renting that video, as distinct from paying for a permanent license, which is buying the video. For items that you don’t pay for individually (but are covered under the monthly fee) Amazon simply uses watch. I have a vague recollection of the time I used Overdrive, but it’s blurry and painful and I don’t remember the wording.

I don’t need to understand how the distinction started to fade, though, to know that it has. I suspect that in forty years, the only people who insist on using borrow for libraries will be alte kockers like me. But oh, will we be snarky about it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.