A View From the Bench

I understand that one of the great strengths of the English language is that it is constantly expanding to accommodate an ever changing world, and that it welcomes new words from other languages. However, sometimes I wonder if the language might not benefit from something equivalent to the Académie Française which protects (peut-être a wee bit too much) the purity of the French language.    

In my view, too many people succumb to the temptation to take a noun and, by some sort of linguistic alchemy, make it into a verb.    

I recall hearing a witness tell me that he and the accused (charged with fraud)  had shared office space. Except, he did not say that; rather, he said, “[The accused] and I officed together." The witness should have been charged with linguistic assault.    

Recently, I have heard business commentators utter statements such as: “This subsidy will incentivise people to invest in…." I concede that “incentivise” (or “incentivize” for those living south of the 49th parallel who, as a people, are to spelling what new math is to arithmetic) is recognized by no less an authority than The Oxford English Dictionary. However, I submit that such recognition is evidence in support of my thesis:  our worries about biological GMOs should be expanded to the ever growing number of linguistic GMOs. “Incentive” is a lovely, calm noun; please do not make it into a mutant verbal creation breaking loose from some language laboratory operated by an evil descendant of Dr. Frankenstein.    

Shakespeare’s Hamlet instructed his actors to “speak the speech…trippingly on the tongue”; words such as “incentivise” stumble and lurch about before falling from one’s mouth in a disheveled heap.    

I might add that I similarly railed against such now common terms as “grow the business”, and “going forward” (when the person means “in the future”). I suffered ignominious defeat in those battles; I am certain no one even heard my anguished cries of dismay. Indeed, I was prepared to permanently abandon my Quixotic campaign. Or, to put it another way: I decided that, going forward, I would abandonise my Quixoticisations.    

Then I was slapped (slapptified) with a new affrontification. In a recent Pre-Sentence Report in relation to an offender who had a criminal record, I read that he had “recidivated”. “No”, I exclaimed, though to no one in particular, and I confess it concerns the near-by judicial assistants when I do that. “This cannot be!”    

Off I went to the OED…and there it was! “Recidivate (verb intransitive): to fall back, relapse." I did take some comfort in the notation that “recidivate” is “obscure, rare”. I suppose the author of the Pre-Sentence Report was simply “going backward” and, upon doing so, found the word “recidivated” officing with all the other words in the OED.


The Honourable Judge A.A. Fradsham is a Provincial Court Judge with the Criminal Court in Calgary. His column “A View From the Bench” has been a highlight in the Canadian Bar Association newsletters for over 15 years.