A Word, Please:

I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was minding my own business, standing in my kitchen washing dishes and couldn’t help but hear the TV in the next room.

There was a program on about “Love,” the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show, and one of the creators was talking about how expensive it is to put on the production. The cost “incentivized me” to make it profitable, he said. In the mumble-mumble years I’ve been writing about grammar, I’ve learned that peevishness is futile. When you start picking on others’ usage, it’s just a matter of time before you make a fool of yourself.

For example, there are countless people in the world who will tell you that it’s wrong to split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, but it takes only 10 seconds to prove them wrong, say by opening up a copy of the “Chicago Manual of Style” or “Garner’s Modern American Usage” or “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” or the “Oxford English Grammar.” I could go on.

The same is true for the folks who still believe you can’t use “healthy” to mean “healthful” or “nauseous” to mean “nauseated.” Any recent dictionary will show that’s not true. But still. “Incentivized me.” I mean, yuck. Right? So I mentioned it on an Internet forum where I sometimes write about language. I was very clear that my objection was of the “yuck” variety and not of the “that’s not a legitimate word” variety.

Within minutes, another user seconded my disdain by saying that he does not accept “incentivized” as a word. What’s more, he added, nouns are nouns and verbs are verbs, and we should respect the distinctions between the parts of speech by not making verbs out of nouns like “incentive.”

That’s when I remembered why I don’t air my own language peeves much. Because the people who agree with me sometimes fail to realize they’re not agreeing with me. Anyone who claims to respect the parts of speech can’t deny that suffixes are, in fact, a part of speech.

Just a few decades ago, “finalize” was considered by some to be an abomination. “Prioritize” suffered the same resistance. Yet they’re so well accepted today that my word-processing software isn’t even putting a red line under them as I type.