Can 'Host' Be a Verb?

Here’s a weird language prejudice to which I once fell victim. I used to work at a community newspaper with a calendar section that listed local events. For example, we might mention an upcoming exhibit at a nearby university or a charity auction put on a by the local chapter of the Humane Society. We got the information from press releases, which very often worded their announcements like this:

“The Humane Society on Tuesday will host a gala …” or “Jameson Gallery will host an exhibit of …”

Press release writers, I learned, rely heavily on the verb “host.” That was a no-no, I was taught. A host is a person, my editors told me. Not an action. According to this logic, you can play host to something, but you can’t host it.

This meant my having to change every instance of “will host” to either “will play host to” or some other alternative, like “will hold an exhibit” or “will conduct an auction” or “will stage performance.” 

The events calendar in our newspaper section was very long. So I did this a lot.

I was pretty new to editing at the time. So I took this rule as gospel and didn’t bother to look it up. A few years later, I was told that was no longer the rule. Host was suddenly OK as a verb, meaning that someone could indeed "host" something.

Turns out, that's what the dictionary had been saying all along. Here’s Webster’s New World:

“host. intransitive verb, transitive verb: to act as host or hostess”

My mistake was believing that our house rule was a real one.

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.