Word Rage is a common phenomenon that particularly affects the intellectual community, whose members apparently can’t convince themselves of their intellectuality unless they swear bodily harm against people who use words they don’t like or misplace apostrophes or other sundry stuff. It also serves as a classic ad-hominem tactic—if you can’t find any sensible counter-argument to someone’s claims, criticize his spelling or usage instead and pat your back for a job well done.

Word rage also takes another form. In this, it’s about specific words irritating the life out of people. Why they dislike these words is never known, but dislike for a word is usually dislike for the people who use those kinds of words, and it’s the poor language that gets to bear the brunt of this animosity. A popular punching bag, for instance, is the corporate world, what with its reputation of spewing out ‘corporate bullshit’.

A few months ago, I answered a question on Quora about the word ‘incentivize’, which joins words such as ‘impactful’ and ‘leverage’ in the long list of words people seem to hate for no particular reason. While I answer for the specific case of incentivize, my comments also apply to word rage for other similar words.

Question

There is a lot of debate over the word “incentivize.” Do you prefer to use it or a simpler term?

My answer

Words don’t become ‘non-words’ because of collective hatred.

It’s surprising how intellectuals in our society, most of whom are rational, sensible, logical human beings (in short, not morons) not only engage in word-rage, they also encourage it.

I don’t understand what goes on behind this linguistic fascism, where people try to impose their personal prejudices over the entire populace without a shred of anything that comes even close to a reasonable argument.

Incentivize is a legitimate, bonafide word, made from very standard derivational morphology. It’s first known use goes back to 1970, according to M-W, so it’s not a very recent creation of the corporate world either. It has a sufficiently unique meaning[1]. The –ize suffix is one of the most productive suffixes in English, and is regularly used to make verbs (terrorize, fossilize, sterilize—not a day would pass without you using an –ize verb). 

Use the same suffix for another similar word, and we have word-haters going rabid all over the internet. If you hate the corporate world, if you are part of the 99% (or whatever else it is that fills you with rage over incentivize), say that. Don’t blame a harmless word that is a legitimate product of a standard morphological process. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

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[1] Don’t claim that you can replace it with another word. It’s not for you to decide what words others wish to choose to express themselves. I can change  ”rather than” to “instead of” and preserve the meaning but that doesn’t mean I will declare all instances of “rather than” as wrong.