Wordwatch: Forbidden
“This year we have lived through periods when we couldn’t leave the house when we liked … When we were forbidden from going to church …”- The Spectator, April 2021. I have got used to this construction now, having encountered it over and over again in recent years. But my immediate instinct is to rewrite that sentence as: “… forbidden to go to church”. Here are two more specimens from the last year or so: “The left-wing mayor forbade the police from working with the federal authorities…”, The Spectator, October 2020; “Barney’s father … forbade her from having anything more to do with de Pougy”- London Review of Books, May 2021. So, it is popular and current in journals not noted for careless English – and plenty of examples could be found elsewhere. But it is new, believe it or not.
Until the late twentieth century, the usual form was with an infinitive: “We were forbidden to walk in the road”; “she forbade me to eat any more chocolate.” This was universal; ‘forbidden’ followed by ‘from’ simply never occurred. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in the course of citing innumerable examples from nearly a thousand years of English, comes up with no specimen of the verb ‘to forbid’ followed by ‘from’. It cites a use of ‘forbid’ with ‘from’ in 1851: “He forbad Hilary Bishop of Narbonne from all metropolitan rights” – but here the construction is followed by a noun, ‘metropolitan rights’, and not by a verb, either as a participle, a gerund (as in my examples above) or as an infinitive. And now it’s commonplace. No doubt the usage has been creeping in for longer than I can recall, but the OED confirms that it is essentially 21st century construction.
‘Forbidden’ has often been used adjectivally: “Of Man’s first Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought death into the World …” sang Milton famously in the 1660s, launching into his great epic poem Paradise Lost. And a sense of absolute prohibition seems to cling to the word, as in interjections we still use frequently, like “God forbid”. Here, of course, there is no ensuing verb, though we are free to invent as many as we like. And without the infinitive, ‘forbid’ seems to lose some of its authority.
For my part, I would quite like to forbid the new usage, but am well aware that any such prohibition would be futile. And in any case, is the new form particularly objectionable? I don’t think it is. It just grates against what I’m accustomed to. But still, I’m astonished by the speed with which it has almost obliterated a recently standard turn of phrase, and even more, by the apparent unawareness of people who write English professionally to their own altered habits.