Finders Keepers

I can't leave this topic alone, for some reason. I can think of a few cases where keep might be acceptable with an implicit rather than explicit direct object:

"--He borrows a lot from you, doesn't he?

--He not only borrows, he keeps."

"--How come you don't have more money in the bank?

--I have no problems earning; I just can't seem to keep."

Or imagine the author of Ecclesiastes writing:

"There is a time to give away and a time to keep."

Or if Worsworth had written:

"The world is too much with us; late or soon,
Earning and keeping, we amass a store..."

In the first two cases, the verb requires an extra stress. Part of the wit might be derived from the ungrammaticality. There is a shift in register. In the pseudo-Ecclesiastes and pseudo-Wordsworth examples, I don't see any such shift.

There is also the expression: "It's not the having it's the keeping." So I've come up with examples using conjugated verbs, infinitives, present participles, and gerunds. As for their acceptability, you be the judge.

My conclusion: no verb in English is obligatorily transitive. If the direct object is implicit from context, we have the same situation as a verb whose object is already implicit because of the nature of the verb itself: "We eat at 7." "In this daycare center we do not bite or kick."

The normally transitive verb used this way acquires the force of a general rule (tendency) or a maxim. It has a certain apodictic charge. In my Spanish poetry I love to use transitive verbs with no object for precisely this effect.

***

I wasn't even thinking about the intranstive uses of the verb in sentences like "Natural peanut butter will keep best in the refrigerator." Henry reminded me of the expression: "How're you keeping?" (i.e. How are you holding up?).

And I wasn't thinking of sentences like "Keep reading my blog," in which keep has the meaning of "continue." Here it's kind of a modal verb.