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FOR SHAME: Ugly ize words sneak into use
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Published: October 25, 2009
Updated: 10/24/2009 07:35 pm
An item here on Sept. 13 was about the word incentivize and a reader's question about its legitimacy. I answered, in effect, that if being listed in dictionaries makes a word legitimate, then incentivize is legitimate.
A word's being listed in dictionaries, however, does not mean that anyone has to use it, or that anyone should. Everyone is free to detest and avoid it, as I do with incentivize. It is just one more ugly ize word of recent coinage that the language does not need. I'll take motivate over incentivize every time.
Even worse than incentivize is an extension of it that Richard A. Genaille of Winston-Salem has asked about. He wrote: "I wonder if others have questioned the use of the word disincentivize. It was in a statement made by John E. Calfree, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute, and published on the front page of the Insight section of the Sunday (Oct. 18) Winston-Salem Journal.
"My fancy Webster's Unabridged Dictionary has not caught up with that one yet. Neither has my Juno Spell Check."
I regret that all I can say is this: Give them time. In addition to incentivize, standard print dictionaries already list disincentive. Can disincentivize be far behind? It has already found its way into several online dictionaries.
It has also found its way into some specialty dictionaries, and what some of them have to say about it is not pretty or kind. For instance, an online source titled The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary says of disincentivize, "Use this one at your own peril."
More acerbic is a book titled The Dictionary of Disagreeable English. The author is Robert Hardwell Fiske, who calls himself "the grumbling grammarian." He agrees with other language critics who say that nouns made into verbs are welcome if they fill a need -- for instance, computerize, jeopardize and criticize.
Less welcome, Fiske says, are such coinages as finalize, prioritize and incentivize when we already have words that mean much the same thing. He says that incentivize "sounds idiotic" and that disincentivize is even worse.
Despite what grumbling grammarians might say, newly coined ize words will continue to proliferate. In politics, bureaucracies and academe, they are a contagion. They are infections whose carriers find plenty of receptive, even eager victims to help spread the latest strain.
Be warned: Fiske tells us about another odious word that has joined others in the bureaucratic lexicon and is spreading: incent, which he calls an idiotic word for encourage or something similar. There is no known antidote.
Another noun turned into a verb recently came to the attention of Leta Duffin of Winston-Salem. She wrote: "I enjoy old movies and was checking them out in the Journal's Select TV Entertainment Magazine. On Sept. 26, on the Lifetime Movies channel I found this entry: ‘Deadly Matrimony -- A detective sleuths the murder of a shady lawyer's wife.'
"I know we turn nouns to verbs at times. However, can it be possible that writers are now going to change nouns to verbs whenever they want to? Oh my!"
They can, and many do. It is up to lexicographers to weigh nouns turned into verbs and decide when ones have gained enough currency to be listed in dictionaries. Sleuth as a verb has already made it.
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines it as a transitive and an intransitive verb meaning to track or trail, as a detective. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines the transitive verb as to search for and discover.
In sleuthing the word sleuth, I learned that it is short for sleuthhound, a kind of bloodhound. Sleuthhound is a combination of the Middle English word sloth, meaning a track or trail, and hound.
Richard Creed is a retired Journal editor. He can be reached at richcreed@triad.rr.com.
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