incent : a big SOTA

[Michael McKernan]

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

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