No crime to greenlight a new verb
IT WAS in the 1990s that I first heard the verb “incentivise”. That was when companies were busy aligning managers’ behaviour with shareholders’ needs by handing out share options and performance bonuses.
Those incentives didn’t work very well; many hold them responsible for out-of-control executive pay and the financial crisis. I thought “incentivise” was a pretty ugly word anyway — and it seems to have been superseded by something worse.
While helping to chair a recent Financial Times conference in Venice, I noticed participants were more likely to say “incent” than “incentivise”, as in: “We are incented to reach as many customers as possible.”
A Harvard Business Review blog last month called for “incent” and “incentivise” to be on a “Bizspeak Blacklist”.
A reader’s comment beneath the blog post complained about business’s habit of turning nouns into verbs.
That wasn’t the only new business verb I noticed at the conference. Someone talked about technology being “obsoleted” — an adjective being turned into a verb this time.
I have been keeping a list of nouns now used as business verbs. Some of them have been irritating people for a while. They include “to keynote”, “to helm” and “to greenlight”.
There are also established verbs that businesspeople now use transitively, such as “to surface” (“we surfaced the issue”) and “to progress”. In his report into patient abuse at England’s Stafford Hospital, the barrister Robert Francis QC said that improvement “was not progressed with the speed required”.
How irritated should we be? First, we need to remember that English has been creating verbs for centuries. “To host”, “to parent” and “to leaflet” were once innovations.
Technology has turned many nouns into verbs: “to phone”, “to radio”, “to X-ray”. Newer ones have slipped into the language. Few shudder when they hear someone say “I e-mailed her” or “I googled it”.
Second, none of the nounsturned-verbs I highlighted (“to highlight” — there’s another one) is actually new.
“Dr Ira Cram … will keynote the meeting,” the American Mineralogist journal said 50 years ago. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Anderson Independent
While we can’t do anything to ban words we dislike … we don’t have to encourage or use them ourselves.
newspaper of South Carolina reported in 1974 that a legislator had “surfaced the controversial issue”.
Kansas’s Hutchinson NewsHerald said in 1941 that the House of Representatives military committee had “greenlighted legislation” to allow President Franklin Roosevelt to prevent defence factory stoppages.
The New York Tribune urged that bills “be progressed as rapidly as possible” in 1887.
In case you think all this verbal innovation was an American crime, Hansard, the British parliamentary record, said in 1898 that a “noble lord” had accused someone of “incenting to murder”.
The verb “to obsolete” appeared in a British historical work in 1640 (“our Modern Laws already obsoleted”). And Shakespeare used the phrase “the business he hath helmed” in Measure for Measure.
A verb’s antiquity doesn’t mean we have to like it, of course. And while we can’t do anything to ban words we dislike — there is no English Academy — we don’t have to encourage or use them ourselves. What we should ask is: Are they useful?
In a 1979 paper, When nouns surface as verbs, Eve Clark and Herbert Clark of Stanford University wrote that the principal motive for verb formation was “economy of expression”. Speakers, they said, “will try to avoid unnecessary prolixity” — which will be news to many who attend conferences.
People also turned nouns into verbs, they said, because it made them easily understood by people who hadn’t heard them as verbs before.
I think we have to accept both “incentivise” and “incent”. The former has the decency to add a verb-like ending to “incentive” and the latter is an abbreviation, like “exam”. The alternative is to say “to provide an incentive”, which is too long. “To obsolete” is also shorter than “to make obsolete”, although you won’t catch me using it.
Someone at the conference came up with the magnificent expression “we must puncture the balloon of clean slatism”, which made me wonder whether a manager had ever promised to “clean slate” by selling underperforming businesses. Yes: Roberto Goizueta, head of Coca-Cola, was quoted by the Toronto Star in 1991 saying just that. When it comes to new verbs, you seldom start with a clean slate. © 2013 The Financial Times Limited