incent : a big SOTA

[Baker, John]

        Well, let's see, there's abort, abuse, act, adapt, addict . . .
.  Are you restricting this to back-formations?

        I'm with Mark:  I hate "incentivize."  I'm not wild about
"incent," partly because we have the perfectly serviceable word
"motivate" that is often better.  Still, "incent" is not a perfect
synonym of "motivate," it's a short word whose meaning is clear, and I
don't personally associate it with "incense" or "incest," so I can't get
on board with it as a SOTA.

        FYI, the Microsoft Outlook spell-checker flags "incentivize" but
not "incent."

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 10:22 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: incent : a big SOTA

One more obnoxifying fact about "to incent" is that its users seemto be
insufficiently fluent in their native language simply to employ a
"functional shift" to create a new verb. To "incentive the consumer"
sounds pretty lame too, but at bottom it's comparatively eloquent.

  Can anyone name another verb that, like "incent," is formed by
dropping the "-ive" from a familiar English noun ?

  JL

"Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mark A. Mandel"
Subject: Re: incent : a big SOTA
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Minority opinion coming up!

I prefer it to "incentivize" [shudder].

-- Mark A. Mandel

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