Incent dissents

Speaking (as I was here) of the Times's After Deadline blog, this week's edition also included a delightful plea from a reader whose comment (like many of them) was meant only to record a peeve that hadn't been mentioned:

Please, please, please, stop using "incentivize." This is an unnecessary expansion of the perfectly good verb "incent."

Of course, both incentivize and incent have been widely denounced as business jargon in recent years. When I polled Boston Globe readers on their distaste for "new" and controversial verbs, incent/incentivize ranked second (after dialogue). So naturally, another Times reader soon posted a terse response:

"incent" is not a word.

Of course it is a word, like it or not. But more than that, the first commenter is correct on the history: Incent was in print, according to the online Oxford English Dictionary, as early as 1844, in a New York weekly. An expanded version of the citation:

She had been dazzled by the supposed wealth of a gay fellow, and, incented by the stupid ambition of an ignorant mother, she thought that the purse of the one was far superior to the heart of the other.

Yes, this is an American source, but incent didn't remain American: By the end of the century, it was appearing in British texts as well. It didn't make much headway, though, over the decades; as the Google Ngram graph shows, it's the newer incentivize that really caught on. (Attempts to split the difference with incentize have flopped.)



We like to think of those -ize verbs as horrible modern business jargon, but in fact, as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes, they've been catching flak for over 400 years. Some die off (pulpitize, melancholize); some stick around (economize, legalize) and make themselves useful. In any case, it's their novelty, not their -ize endings, that rubs people the wrong way. Despisers of -ize should breathe deeply and recall that one of our oldest -ize verbs, respectably rooted in Latin and Greek, is the 13th-century baptize.