The world would be a much better place if advertisers and marketers stopped using the non-word "impactful" to try to sell something. Your product or service does not contain impact. Impact is the effect it has on your audience.

Allen Garvin wrote, "The prescription against "impact" as a verb is puzzling."

"prescription" should have been "proscription" if I understand the intent of the sentence correctly. "A prescription against..." doesn't fit the context.

My own pet peeve is the "nounification" of verbs.

Thanks, Mignon. I've hated hearing the word impact misused.

I can grudgingly evolve into accepting "impact" as a verb. I don't like it, and I think it's lazy, but I know language has to evolve, too.
However, I attended a presentation recently in which the presenter used the word "impactful." Sorry, but I just can't go THERE yet. Ouch!

Impact can be confusing, though. I edit technical writers, and they use "impact" in place of "affect," in place of "effect," and, in some environmental reports, "impact" is a euphemism for "contaminated," as in contaminated soil or water. My authors rarely use the word to mean "to strike."

I made up a goofy sentence as an example:

The backhoe impacted impacted soil, which will impact the project schedule; the impact on the budget is unknown. (The backhoe hit contaminated soil, which will affect the project schedule; the effect on the budget is unknown.)

I couldn't fit the compressed/impacted tooth definition into the sentence. Maybe someone else can.

Regarding proton torpedoes in Star Wars:

"Did it go in?"
"Negative... just impacted on the surface."

Sounds like a verb to me.

I seriously just thought "impact" had always been a verb. I have heard it all my life that way.

Unless one is describing the condition of a tooth, overuse of the word "impact" today has pretty much lost its effect as an intensified version of the word "affect". It appears as if its use might have found favor with media commentators because of the plosive delivery of the "p" in pronouncing the word "impact". The net result is a hackneyed rhetorical device that has now become an annoying distraction instead of a help to the flow of a sentence.

Nouns move to verbs almost effortlessly in English. It's one of the most wonderful things about the language, which is packed full of nouns that have made the jump. It has been going on for a thousand years, and language writers have noticed it for more than a couple centuries. Native speakers can easily create nonce verbs on the fly, from nouns, and, from the context, will be understood without a problem.

The prescription against "impact" as a verb is puzzling. It's been used in that sense for about a century. It causes no confusion. It has more forceful connotations than the bloodless "affect". No one expressed dislike for the term for several decades of its use, nor have many people expressed disapproval of the hundreds of other nouns that have become verbed in that time.

Also, the OED shows us that the word started out as a verb, though in the literal sense. The figurative sense arose as a noun in th 19th century, and that seems to have shifted to a verb in the early 20th.

I would say that unless you're writing for a publication whose style guide peevishly proscribes it, you should never worry or be ashamed of using it.

--- Y E S !! ---