The “ize” have it…really??

I cringe every time I hear someone use the word “incentivize”. It’s a testament to the pollution of the English language.

According to The Global Language Monitor, English hit the one-million-word mark on June 10, 2009, when “Web 2.0″ was accepted as a word. Technically, I would call that a “term” and not a new word. This same site says we are gaining a new word every 98 minutes. Where are they all coming from?

Well, in the case of “incentivize”, which was not in the dictionary 20 years ago, the word resulted from misuse, misunderstanding, or, as George Bush might say, “misoverdefining”.

“Incentive” comes from the word “incite”, which means to spark an action. “Incite” is a verb that prompted the noun “incentive”, meaning the reward that is used to incite the desired reaction. But because too many people didn’t know this, they simply added “ize” to the end. It’s easy.

Based on this practice and the speed at which our language is breeding, we can expect a new noun to emerge: incentivization, which is the process of incentivizing. Then, we can add “incentivizational” to our adjectives collection. After that, the “incentivizational” promotion can be further incentivizationalized. At that point, we’ll do what most people do and abbreviate it.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.