Yeah, that’s bad.
No. I’ve been hearing it for around 5 years now.
I think the general trend is to use nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns.
(For example: “Generalizing thought-leadership trendifies verbizing nouns and nounifying verbs.”)
This thread reminds me of many years back when I was helping my BIL do his final paper in college. Just to set the stage, by “helping” I mean I was typing it for him as he paced and dictated. By “college” I mean a non-accredited Bible college in FL or GA - I’m not sure exactly which. By “final paper”, I mean a conglomeration of buzzwords and favorite preacher phrases that said nothing but sounded impressive. He would quote all sorts of sermons as examples of… something. Honest to goodness, I have no idea what he was doing with this paper, and I wrote down every word. I’m pretty sure I strained something by not snarking or rolling my eyes. It had nothing to do with me not being Southern Baptist, it had everything to do with polysyllabic verbiage that never made a point.
He did “graduate” and has spent the last 20+ years bouncing from job to job, not holding any of them more than 2 or 3 years. Maybe his problem is that he’s not tried a corporate career - maybe that’s where his strength lies?? Goodness knows, he’s got the BS down pat.
Peple, there is a perfectly correct, shorter word for that useage - “incent”. As in:
Yes, “incentivize” is now in some dictionaries. I’m just not sure why, when “incent” does a perfectly cromulent job.
I’d love to continue this thread, but I have a hard stop.
And I thought you were just happy to see me.
How do these things get started, anyway? Is there some executive YouTube channel where upper management gets the newest buzzwords from?
It’s like fashion week. They all go and view the latest collections and choose what to bring back to the office.
“Hard stop” is fairly common. It’s typically understood that there is a stopping point that is not flexible. Meetings often run back to back, for 4-8 hours straight. If you are running into time on one meeting but need to wrap up, often you can go over just a bit and it’s no big deal. You’ll be late to the next meeting, but so will others and that’s common.
If you tell people you have a hard stop, that means that you will not go over, even if you are in the middle of discussion. This is mostly used if a person has another meeting with a more senior person, or they have some external appointment they can’t miss, or have to pick up their children, etc.
Ooh. I want to be the guy who walks up and down the runway saying, “What’s the ask here?” and “Let’s reach out to key stakeholders!”
Strictly speaking, that IS what they were saying.
I will never give up this battle. Given that I’m the only one in the department that can a) proof-read and b) type *, I’m having significant success.
- And that, I think, is a powerful argument for the non-incentivizers. Why should we trust those who cannot be arsed to master the simplest tools of communication with the most powerful?
I did not know that “incent” was a word, but, if you think about it, “incentive” obviously implies that.
ETA: I think “stakeholder” is a useful addition.
The only thing more entertaining than the examples and samples in this thread, is Bone, even sven, and other’s defense of such ridiculous terminology.
Thank You!! 
I was just wondering how it took 4 whole pages before anyone said “incent.”
Then again, it’s so much more fun to add suffixes to each other. It’s a verb! Now it’s a noun! Now it’s a verb again!
I know - rationalize as in “to make rational” is a very proper way to use the word. but the connotation that includes “make excuses for” is not a project I want my name all over - particularly when the end result of the project has a pretty good chance of being just that without any true rationalization taking place.
Words have meaning - both denotation and connotation.
The verb for ‘incentive’ is ‘incite’.
While I agree some of the terminology is quite silly, much of it is commonly used in the corporate environment. That being the case, it would be career limiting to battle the inertia that exists.
The term “rationalize” I find most often used in the context of RIFs or layoffs. Two similar teams may merge due to acquisition or growth or for whatever reason. We rationalize the groups to determine any potential overlap - those positions are rationalized (eliminated).
According to Merriam-Webster, “incentivize” was first used in 1970 and “incent” was first used in 1981, so by whatever weird metric you’re using (unless that metric is “shorter is better”), incentivize is “more correct”.
Yeah, but “incite” has a horribly negative connotation. The only times I can ever think of “incite” being used are in phrases as wonderful as “incite chaos”, “incite a riot”, and other fossilized negative expressions like that. You might be able to get away with “incite change”, but that’s about the closest you can get to a positive connotation with that word.
And FWIW, I was born in 1989 and had no idea until this thread that “incentivize” was a neologism. I just did a straw poll of a several of my similar-aged friends and, keeping in mind anecdotes are not data, all of them just thought of it as a word, and not in any way business-speak. The definition most of them came up with off the cuff was in the realm of “to encourage or motivate with an explicit, well-defined, concrete reward.”
I did a bit of Googling and found this. So I guess ask-as-a-noun has been around in some circles for at least a decade (and hated even then).
I generally think that there’s nothing inherently wrong with nouning and verbing words. It’s the vagueness and the passive-aggressiveness and fundamental dishonesty of some of the terms that bugs me. They’re completely at odds with the values of concreteness, specificity, and clarity in language.
I always imagine “Grok” like this.
My “office” is an ambulance. As such, I miss a lot of these buzzword usages. But the last time I was in trouble, my boss invited me into his office, and motioned to a chair, and said, “pull up a sit down.”
Laughing at him didn’t help my case that morning.
Sorry if it has been mentioned before…but the pharmaceutical sales industry is full of this crap.
Verbage: I hate that term (no, not verbiage, which means superfluous wording). For example…“that was a great sales pitch, now just work on the verbage” WTF?
On territory- used at company meetings to refer when we sales reps are back working in our territories.
In the field- I laugh inside bc I picture a bunch of sales reps actually in corn fields wandering around
Model of the world- “you have to learn the doctor’s model of the world.” What? You mean how he thinks/sees things? Just say that!