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Jill u Nan oi Cincinnati passed along a letter to the editor of the Enquirer: “As an avid fan of baseball, 1 am absolutely abhorred [abhor is an old verb; here it’s simply used passively] by what I have witnessed...” A great many other avid fans share her abhorrence.
None of my desk dictionaries sanction “to incent,” thank you, but the abhorrible verb announced a stock plan “in order to incent” its key employees. “To incent” is worse than “to incentivize," but not much worse.
From a publication called Musclecar Review comes a verb that may be no more than an interesting misspelling. “Lug nuts aren’t expensive, but they sure can widdle away at the budget.” Webster’s III lists widdle as a shortened form of widdle-waddle, meaning to struggle or wriggle. 1 have heard the verb as baby talk for what infants do when they wet their diapers, but 1 expect all the writer meant was “whittle away.”
Two newspapers, far apart, made a verb out of Dr. Kevorkian last year. At a time when Florida was getting some bad publicity for the shooting of tourist, The Associated Press quoted the head of Miami’s convention bureau: “Channel 7 is Kevorkianing their own marketplace.” In Seattle the Post-Intelligencer reported that a computer publishing firm had gone broke. “At least it was able to Kevorkian itself, instead of being buried by competitors.”
Now there’s a verb that won’t make it. Shoot “to Kevorkian” into cyberspace and let it go.
Copyright 1995
Universal Press Syndicate
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