Dissent on incent
POLL YOUR FELLOW citizens on incent, and you'll find some who use it unselfconsciously, some who've never heard it, and some who wish they'd never heard it. Marilyn Whipple, who emailed recently asking for a verdict on the coinage, is clearly in category 3: ''I maintain that incent was not intended to be a verb,'' she wrote. And even if the dictionaries have caved on it, ''among sticklers, that should not make it right.''
Whipple has plenty of company. Three years ago, when I asked readers which new verbs they most disliked, incent (with its partner incentivize) came in second, with 26.3 percent of the 5,500 votes (dialogue, at 27.5 percent, was first). Some people deny the word's very existence: ''Incent is not yet a verb in the English language,'' said ComputerWire last year. ''There is no such word as incent,'' claimed a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star in 2002. And on the website Presentations.com, you'll learn that ''incent is not a verb - heck, it's not even a word.''
Hyperbole, of course, but still, one wonders: Do these scolds really think they get to decide which words live and die? You may find incent startling (as I do), you may wish it didn't exist, but if people are using it to communicate - and they are, they are - then it is a word. Is it silly, ugly, unnecessary? If you like, but so are pierced tongues and ''Fear Factor''; that doesn't make them imaginary.
For some reason, though, defenders of language are susceptible to this sort of recklessness: They saddle up their high horses and gallop off into a quicksand of speculation, leaving their fact-checkers in the dust. Two recent reports, for instance, credited President Bush with having coined incent, though a Google search (0.32 seconds!) would have revealed that the verb is pushing 30.
Then there's the kind of random commentary practiced by G. Woodson Howe, former editor of the Omaha World Herald, who deemed incent a ''silly'' word in a 1994 article. You may agree, but do you go along with his distaste for the journalistic use of sourced, as in ''their story on the prisoners was fully sourced'' - an otherwise uncontroversial usage that dates to the 50s? But wait, there's more: Howe also rants against the use of ''heritable'' in genetic contexts; he prefers heritable for estates, inheritable for DNA. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, heritable was being used to describe hereditary traits in 1570, fully two and a half centuries before inheritable acquired that sense. To call heritable ''unorthodox'' and ''pretentious,'' as he does, is to dress up a fetish as sober advice.
But at least it's still presented as advice. The Tucson Citizen declared it a fact, in 2002, that ''the noun incentive has no root that can be correctly used as a verb.'' A letter to the editor of Computer Reseller News, in 1997, was equally certain: ''Incent is not the verb form of the word incentive,'' it said. ''According to the dictionary, the word incentive stems from the verb to incite.''
If that dictionary exists, however, it is in error. Incentive derives from the Latin incentivum, which in turn comes from the verb incinere, to set the tune, lead the music. The root verb is canere, to sing - as in chant, bel canto, cantor. Incent is a ''back formation,'' created by clipping the noun incentive, but if it had evolved through the centuries, nothing about the verb form would be implausible. (Accent is rooted in the same Latin verb, and nobody calls it a bastard.)
And though its critics call it superfluous, incent does bring one new trick to the table. It can be used neutrally, to mean simply ''offer a reward'' for a given behavior. When you encourage, inspire, or motivate someone, the connotations are almost always positive; you want another word for laws that incent child welfare departments to break up families or incent schools to drop pupils. (Situations that reward unwanted results are known as ''perverse incentives,'' not ''perverse inspirations.'')
If incent were just slang, like dis or fanzine or bling, it wouldn't be nearly so bothersome; we complain about slang when it seems overexposed, we drop it when it sounds dated, but we rarely say that it never should have been born. Some jargon gets a pass, too - cops and docs show off their lingo on hit TV shows. But corporatespeak (like psychobabble) is a lingo we love to hate. And that's OK, as long as we don't base our opposition on wishes and fictions.
Email freeman@globe.com.
