A well-known literary scholar (now deceased) came up with such a humorous rhyme:

You can't wear clothes, 
You can't wear Hope. 
You can wear Nadezhda, 
You can wear clothes.

A comprehensive "guide" to the use of these two insidious verbs!

But using put on instead of put on seems to be invincible! It seems that no manual on speech culture can do without pointing out this error. And some rather cultured native speakers of the literary language also speak this way.

The question may arise: shouldn't such usage be treated more leniently? We know that norms are changing. Is a new norm emerging? You can cite the facts in favor of this opinion. There is a verb to change clothes, but there is no verb to change clothes. Therefore, you can change not only the child, but also a dress or shoes. It does not have a parallel formation with the prefix on - and the verb to put on shoes, so you can put on both a person and boots. Maybe the verb dress follows the path of these verbs?

However, while the traditional norm requires distinguishing between the use of the verbs to put on and to put on, it is necessary, at least, to faithfully reproduce the texts of authors who adhere to this norm. Surprisingly, this elementary requirement is not always met. Here are two sad incidents.

In Voprosy Literatury (Voprosy Literatury) (1996, No. 3), E. G. Babaev's posthumous essay "Shamrock" is published - about the idea of an anthology of Russian poetry. The essay includes cycles of three poems by F. Sologub, A. Fet, M. Kuzmin, M. Tsvetaeva. The last author's" Shamrock " includes the following line:" I will put a silver cross on my chest... " (p.317).

page 42

It can't be, because it can never be, I decided. It would have been possible not to check, but I still checked and made sure that Tsvetaeva is not responsible for what was published in a reputable magazine. E. Babayev is also innocent: "Shamrock" is published in his " Memoirs "(St. Petersburg, 2000), and on page 31, of course, it is printed: "I will put a silver cross on my chest..."

The second case is no less surprising. In the booklet of the exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts, entitled " Towards Proust "(Moscow, 2001), there is a quote from the novel "Captive": "she wore a dress from Fortuny..." (p.26). Did the famous translator N. M. Lyubimov make this mistake? No, it wasn't his fault. Here is a quote from the novel: "That evening Albertine put on a dress by Fortuny, and it seemed to me a seductive shadow of invisible Venice "(Marcel Proust. Captive, Moscow, 1993, p. 335).

In a speech at the All-Russian Congress of Teachers in 1960, Alexander Tvardovsky said about his sharp rejection of the use of put on instead of put on: "I myself, like a grain of sand in bread falling on my tooth, can't stand the word "put on a hat", but for some reason it is written so stubbornly instead of"put on". We all know that you can dress a child, dress someone, and only put on a hat, like a fur coat, like boots " (A. Tvardovsky. On literature, Moscow, 1973, p. 296).

I was surprised to find a line from early Tvardovsky: "You will wear your purchased flare ..." (See: "Day of Poetry", Moscow, 1986, p. 33). Then I thought, maybe I shouldn't be too surprised. The distance between an aspiring author and a famous poet, a highly cultured editor of a famous magazine is quite large.

But don't the two incidents just demonstrated suggest that Tvardovsky's line was reproduced with an error?

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