_Enthuse_

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:20 PM -0400 10/8/10, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Heard on NBC News:
>
>"[Proper Name] is _enthused_ with her pending graduation from
>college!" or some such.
>
>
>The war against _enthuse_ has been raging at least since I was a
>grade-schooler in the '40's. At the time, being yet a child and,
>hence, open to all kinds of language shift, I could never understand
>in what way the use of this word could possibly be problematic and
>deserving of prescriptivist opprobrium. Nowadays, as my intellectual
>clarity has matured over the span of dekkids, I now understand
>completely: _enthuse_ is wrong. It's as simple as that.
>
>To coin a paraphrase:
>
>"Every time we think we've buried it, it gets dug right back up!"
>

Yeah, back-formations don't get great reviews.  I'm sure there have
been similar battles against others, from "edit" to "surveil" to
"euthanize".  "Enthuse" has a number of 19th century hits in the OED
(before even our time, Wilson!), including one from an 1827
publication industriously dug up by someone who plunked it down in a
1947 paper from American Speech (probably on the same topic; I'm too
lazy to check).

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