At what point do mistakes involving language use turn into common usage? Just lately I've noticed here a little bit of a tendency for strive to be used as a noun, rather than a verb. Example: he felt a strive to get good grades. This sounds so utterly wrong to me that it jars powerfully, but it obviously sounds right to quite a few folks in these parts. Curiously I'm reminded of Hopkins's, the achieve of, the mastery of... , which sounds absolutely great in its wrongness.
Is there some false, unconscious analogy with drive going on here - as in, he had the drive to succeed (and thus he had the strive to succeed)?
I wonder how quickly I'll get used to the usage, if it manages to take hold. (I have the oddest feeling I've heard, or read, more of it recently after starting to see it over the last year, but I could be wrong about this.) Thinking slantwise from the Hopkins bit, I'm now thoroughly inured to the use of achieve as an intransitive verb, as in we will achieve, we will achieve, which used to sound peculiar to me. But more than twenty years of it in a song I'm told is beloved of the nation sort of evens the bump out.
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