Eugene has given me the language usage bug. I happened to see this in an article from a UK website called Orange. Here’s the usage that intrigued me:
Strangely, three months before the birth of Guangchun, his family’s sow also labored a weird shaped piglet, which had eight legs, two mouths and four ears.
I have never seen “labored” used as a verb in this way before. Is it a British usage? Is it commonplace? I’ve never heard this usage before. (Let me clarify – I don’t mean the ordinary expression “went into labor,” but rather the specific verb usage here.)