[The New York Times Spelling Bee, March 21, 2025.]
Here’s the pangram from several days ago, waiting its turn for a post.
From the entry for incent and incentivize in Garner’s Modern English Usage (2022):
Dating from the mid-1970s, these have become vogue terms, especially in American business jargon....Honest judge that he is, Bryan Garner has moved incentivize up from Stage 2, “Widely shunned,” to Stage 5 on the GMEU Language-Change Index: “Fully accepted.” And incent has inched up from Stage 1, “Rejected,” to Stage 2.
Incentivize, an -ize neologism, is much more common than *incent, a back-formation. Many still believe there is no good incentive to use either one.
Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)
comments: 1
I was among those widely shunning. Part was the prejudice against creating a verb out of a noun with -ize. But the word was used to avoid the details of the deals that governments made to attract businesses. "Incentivizing" a Fortune 500 company by waiving millions in taxes to the local school district, for example.
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