incent : a big SOTA

[Dennis R. Preston]

JL,

It's very interesting to me that you associate the use of items you
disapprove of (and which reflect natural linguistic processes) with a
lack of sobriety. Perhaps you would like to offer a drug-and-alcohol
(or ludic?) theory of linguistic change.

dInIs

>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
>
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--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
Morrill Hall 15-C
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 USA
Office: (517) 353-4736
Fax: (517) 353-3755

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