incent : a big SOTA

[Jonathan Lighter]

Since comic relief is the only kind I get these days, I have no objection to words like "incent" (or "burgle" or "truthiness" or "heorshe" or "obnoxify") used humorously or ironically or any other way except soberly.

  And since I was paid for thirty years by a state government to get prescriptivist every time I graded a student paper, it's hard for me - as for many others - not to revert to type when, e.g., a state governor repeatedly uses a neologism that makes him sound like a dope. (To a pure descriptivist, of course, no usage can possibly make you sound like a dope; it's just linguistic change.  Which approach best characterizes reality ?)

  Allow me to reassure everyone that, first, I think users of "incent" should not really be scourged, just sentenced to community service; and, second, I don't really believe that the existence of this stupidism heralds the Death of English, End of the World, Heat Death of the Universe, Reversal of the Big Bang, or the like.

  But such things do have to start somewhere.

  JL
Michael McKernan <mckernan at LOCALNET.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Michael McKernan
Subject: Re: incent : a big SOTA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Subject: Re: incent : a big SOTA

>Nice try, Mike, but OED shows "invect" to be a rather uncommon 16th-17th
>C. term, an alternative to _inveigh_, and regards it as having been
>abstracted straight from Latin _invectus_, past ppl. of _invehere_. They
>don't see it as a back-formation from _invective_.
>
> Of course, it could be, *in theory*. ("Communism works too--*in theory*
>! " --Homer Simpson.) But evidently the idea of forming a verb in such a
>way was so unthinkable to the OED editors that they didn't...er, think of
>it.
>

Thanks for supplying the OED canon on invect. No argument from me on the
uncommon quality of the verb. OTOH, 'invective' has a bit more in the way
of legs, which I thought was more of what you were looking for: reasonably
common noun forms. (Which might argue for naive back-formation? I did
google some current 'invect' usage, probably not derived from study of
historical lexicography.)

It seems to me that many English speakers may well infer a 'rule' that
subtracting 'ive' suffixes will provide verb forms, if mostly from
adjectives rather than nouns. Is this a rather subtle distinction? Do we
not risk the 'prescriptivist' label if we insist on demonstrable
back-formation?

To what level of detail do naive would-be-rule-applying speakers have to
examine their assumptions?

In my own ignorance, I suppose that many assumptions concerning rules are
phonetic and/or visual: if it sounds like a duck, and looks like a duck,
it is a duck, regardless of back-formation...but perhaps Jonathan is
claiming otherwise, based on a paucity of specific empirical exx.?
Personally, I can see choosing 'incent,' even as an obvious neologism, in
some situations, either for comic relief or emphasis, or even to make a
point about prescriptivism, etc.

Waiting patiently to be further educated, I remain,

yours truly,


Michael McKernan

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org




---------------------------------

 What are the most popular cars? Find out at Yahoo! Autos

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org