convey

Here the load is an idea, and the vehicle is words, tone or images: convey an impression, convey information, convey a feeling. Unlike say or tell, it covers what is implied as well as stated. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) speaks of conveying a falsehood without the tongue telling an untruth. In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), the narrator "cannot convey the peculiar sensations" of time travel, a common way of confessing the limits of language.

The word's history explains its plainest meaning: Old French conveier, from Latin via, "way", the same source as convoy. The subject is often the route or medium rather than a person: air conveys sound, a pipe conveys water, and in Henry Gray's anatomy of 1858 the Fallopian tubes convey the ova. It also takes the passive easily (water is conveyed through the pipe), which suits technical description.

Carrying people rather than goods gives this use its period flavor. Shakespeare's "Convey me to my bed" and Jane Austen's Persuasion, where Miss Elliot is "conveyed home in Lady Dalrymple's carriage", show its natural setting: a carriage or attendants doing the work, often in the passive. Today it sounds dated. In everyday speech, take or drive is the safer choice, while the sense for moving things stays current.

Law's version of carrying moves ownership rather than an object. The thing conveyed is a right, a title or land, and the recipient follows to: convey title to the buyer, convey ownership to a daughter. The move can be strategic. In Edmund Spenser's account of Ireland, written in 1596, the Earl of Desmond secretly conveyed all his lands to trustees before rebelling, hoping to keep them out of the Crown's hands.