Thursday, June 4, 2009

Using Ize to Destruct the English Language

Alright, I am going to take a brief reprieve from my anger-filled rantings on political issues, which I know you savor like sweet little baby bell peppers filled with cream cheese. Or not, but anyway (thinly veiled self-affirmation there). Something has been bugging the living crap out of me regarding the slow destruction of the English language. I am not an English language expert. I do, however, know when stupidity and word-abuse is occurring, and this is the linguistic equivalent of child-abuse. It's the use of the suffix -ize, to turn a noun which is turned into an adjective already, into a verb. I'll explain (with the example that makes me realize how ignorant some people are - but intelligence was never a prerequisite for jobs in the news media, and we know they are not prerequisites for jobs in the entertainment industry):

Incentive - noun: something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort.
Incent - verb; to do something that incites...(insert the definition above).

--We're okay so far, but here comes the problem--

Incentivize (word used repeatedly on the news) - verb (I differ here because this word is not in any dictionary you pick up that has been printed 5 years ago or early, but you will now find it in online dictionaries, because complete idiots have used this so many times, it is now being considered a word). 

It is acceptable to take a noun, like money, put an -ize on the end of it, and make a word that means to turn into money: monetize. Another example is the noun weapon being converted into the verb weaponize. Again, -ize is to turn into.

You would never say adaptivize, or addictivize, or consumptivize, or constructivize, or delusivize. You would say adapt, or addict, or consume, or construct, or delude. So that's why I say these guys have crap for brains, and need some extensive 2x4 therapy to the head. (Now, if you are secretly thinking to yourself, yeah, I would say that, or, I have said that, or, that sounds pretty cool and sophisticated, I think I will use that word in the future to impress people, you are also a candidate for 2x4 therapy to the head.)

I would love for these media buffoons who use make-up words like incentivize (and think they are clever in doing so) to apologize that they repeatedly failed to recognize their murder of the English language. Their crime of popularizing this pretend word causes me to agonize, and provokes within me the desire to cauterize the bleeding extrusions of such disfunctional brains, but I know that will not civilize their dialectal deviance. I remain constrained to only satirize and attempt to ostracize their actions, to theorize on the sources of their obtuseness, while they brutalize the language and antagonize those who care, truly care about its proper usage. 

Okay, enough. Thanks for playing. :^/

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