Without needing to think about it very much—possibly without thinking about it at all—we develop an understanding of multiple ways in which verbs can be created and used. But just because a new verb conforms to a governing set of rules, that does not guarantee it universal success. Indeed, many a recently coined example, unimpeachably put together, has been reviled by the gripers as ridiculous and—the old beef—redundant. This is of course excellent news for your campaign, and given your selfless resolve to rush into the front lines in the battle for our language, you may now be wondering how else, other than by conversion, horrible new verbs are generated.
One method is a process known as ‘back-formation’, a trick whose results are unlikely to please those noisy on the subject of Good English. But what is it exactly? The OED defines a back-formation as a word derived from another word in a way that might well give the impression of the derivative word’s having come first. An example it provides is the verb to burgle. You perhaps imagine that the act of burgling gave rise to a name for ‘one who burgles’: a burglar. But actually it was the other way round, and the noun burglar preceded the verb to burgle by more than three hundred years. In the twenty-first century, the idea of burgling seems entirely acceptable, lexically; but it was received at first, in the 1870s, as a humorous coinage, defined by the OED, with a twinkle in its eye, as meaning to ‘rob burglariously’. In a curious parallel, the noun shoplifter predates by over a hundred years the verb to shoplift, a back-formation credited to the poet Shelley.** As evidence of how disliked a back-formation can be, try Richard Grant White (who wrote of horrible words as ‘monsters’) on the verb to donate, which came hundreds of years after the noun donation: ‘I need hardly say, that this word is utterly abominable—one that any lover of simple honest English cannot hear with patience and without offence’.
Not all back-formations are verbs. It would be natural to assume that the noun greed gave rise to the adjective greedy. Instead, greed is a back-formation: greedy came first by over 600 years. The noun diplomat is another example. It might be thought reasonable to suppose that its first element, the Greek diplo, meaning ‘twofold’, is intended to invoke the duplicitous or double-dealing nature of the foreign agent. Instead, diplomat is a nineteenth-century back-formation from the much earlier adjective diplomatic, itself derived from the noun diploma, which from the 1640s was the name for an official document notionally folded in two.** As with nouns, so too some verbs are back-formations derived from adjectives. For instance, the verb sidle derives from sideling, a medieval adjective and adverb akin to its later equivalent, sidelong; and the seventeenth-century verb laze is a back-formation derived from the earlier adjective lazy.
It remains that the stock idea of a back-formation is that of a verb derived from a noun. Here is a sample from the last couple of centuries given in chronological order:** 1827, to enthuse from enthusiasm (the OED still crossly calls enthuse ‘ignorant’); 1861, to diagnose from diagnosis; 1864, to sculpt from sculptor; 1884, to elocute from elocution, credited in the comic form ‘yellocute’ to Mark Twain; 1900, to emote from emotion; 1928, to liaise from liaison, originally military slang; 1929, to spectate from spectator; 1943, to choreograph from choreography; 1960, to surveil from surveillance: ‘All the time, the investigators were surveilling him surveilling them’ (Guardian). An example not yet in the OED, but also in evidence for a couple of centuries, is to conversate from conversation (‘Jesus used prayer to commune and conversate with God’**), while earlier examples than all of these, still dismissed as illiterate, include to evolute, 1735; to opinionate, 1599; and to aggress, 1570. Four of the verbs above have settled into the language and will raise the pulse of perhaps only the purest purists: to sculpt, diagnose, choreograph and liaise. But the rest may well leave the good griper in a bit of a state. To take just one, R. H. Fiske, in his heart-sinking reflections on ‘unendurable’ English, declares that, ‘Lopped from the noun elocution, elocute is severed from its force and effectiveness’, etc.
In your campaign to move Good English along, you could do worse than to push the ready-made irritants given above. As for thinking up a new back-formation, it perhaps strikes you that this would require more intellectual effort than you can spare. If so, happily, there is a related way to generate verbs—and ill-feeling among the defenders of Good English—that requires next to no work at all. You simply fall in with what A. P. Herbert called ‘Ize-mania’.**
The verb to burgle sprang up in British English at roughly the time another coinage with the same meaning, to burglarise, sprang up in North American usage. This second form soon filtered into British English, where it has lingered, but without ever becoming as popular as the first. Consider, however, by way of contrast, the verbs arising out of the medieval noun jeopardy. The back-formation to jeopard—yes, really—can be found in the work of Chaucer; and though Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, confidently described to jeopard as obsolete, it staggered on well into the nineteenth century: in a work of 1895, George Trumbull Ladd had no qualms over writing about how to ‘jeopard all sound argument in the philosophy of mind’. As jeopard declined, however, jeopardise came to the fore instead. Richard Grant White could hardly stand it. He listed jeopardise as not only a ‘monster’ but a ‘foolish and intolerable word’. Ambrose Bierce, weighing up jeopardise, concluded similarly that—especially given the existence of imperil—there was ‘no need for anything so farfetched and stilted’. As we now know, however, jeopard would fall right out of the language; imperil would become quaint; and jeopardise, after a while, would effortlessly hold sway.
Forming verbs after the pattern of jeopardise is nothing new. Authorise has been in the language since around 1400, anathematise, since the mid 1500s, and so on. All the same, when Ben Jonson, in his play The New Inne, 1631, introduced the word problematise into the English language, he did have a character respond to it with, ‘Bless us, what’s that?’ And as well as this startled response, we have, in the preface to his 1594 work Christs Teares, the thoughts of Thomas Nashe, wit, pamphleteer and friend of Jonson, as evidence of how new verbs of this kind were received four centuries ago. Nashe, to the joy of numerous future historians of the language, wrote a lengthy riposte to his lexical ‘reprehenders’, including those who, he said, ‘complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in ize’. The coinages in question included to citizenize, oblivionize, retranquilize, superficialize and palpabrize (to ‘feel’ with a sickly hint of to ‘touch up’). Nor did Nashe’s reprehenders stop him going on to coin examples after 1594—beruffianize, documentize, chamelionize, infamize, and more—though for his writing crimes more broadly, his enemies did see to it that he was thrown into prison.
Perhaps because -ize or -ise is so easy to wield, verbs formed this way can appear lightweight and humorous. Shakespeare must have wished to raise a smile when in Two Gentlemen of Verona he created the idea of ‘living dully sluggardiz’d at home’. Fanny Burney, when she coined ‘Englishize’ and ‘quietize’, and Disraeli, when he coined ‘monologise’ and ‘paragraphise’, were evidently both in a silly mood. And Saul Bellow cannot have been much worried by thoughts of the dictionary when in his last novel, Ravelstein, he had a character, marooned in a fancy car, declare, ‘I sat in it, feeling imbecilized …’. Back in ordinary use, the verbs philosophise, attitudinise and therapise all come with the suggestion of an eyebrow half raised.
And yet plenty of verbs of this kind are not lightweight in the least, while many that may start out seeming odd are normalised fast. One that was widely hated in the past, but that rarely makes a showing in style guides today, is finalise: ‘still objected to by many’ as ‘ungainly’, writes Bill Bryson, just in case. But is it really? In 1982, prioritise was described by the OED as ‘a word that at present sits uneasily in the language’. By 1989 the caveat had gone. And whereas a lingering Victorian entry on ‘nonce’ words, or one-offs, gives pedestrianise as an example, a later, handsome entry on pedestrianise itself amply demonstrates that the ‘nonce’ label is no longer valid. Publicise, routinise, trivialise, legitimise and indeed normalise are all early Victorian coinages. Weaponise, incentivise and medicalise are much more recent. Examples so modern that they are not yet in the OED, though it may not be too long before they shed their uncomfortable feel, include otherise, amenitise and calendarise. John Humphrys, in Lost for Words, declares that anonymise—which kicked in in the 1950s—is not a ‘real verb’. What he means by ‘real’ he omits to explain.
A. P. Herbert thought adding -ize was the mark of a salesman or a ‘swanker’. And he might still think so today were he to slog through a recent business report vaunting a product designed to ‘commoditize hardware in the network visibility fabric market’; or a job description for an analyst who must ‘develop, implement, and productionize standard and ad-hoc reports’; or a plug for an energy company that will ‘work to reliabilize new fabrication processes’; or an advertisement—aimed at ‘relationship managers’ in ‘bank operations’—promoting computer software that will enable them ‘to actionize and work with customers to close the loop instantly’; or a comment in an LED patent on ‘the trend of the development to smallize the electrical products’; or even the rubric of a bicycle-hire company informing potential customers that it ‘does not responsibilize for any accidents, injuries or whatsoever’. There are many tribes in the grip of ize-mania who find -ize (or -ise) handy for generating special vocabulary for their own special purposes (which is to say ‘jargon’). An academic explains to fellow academics, who will understand precisely, that ‘classical proofs do not readily effectivize’; a bureaucrat discusses whether to ‘renewalize these industries’; a legal journal notes that ‘features of governmentality are working from a distance to responsibilize state conduct’.
This deluge of examples should demonstrate how unchallenging -ize or -ise is to deploy: to generate a new verb, usually with the primitive sense of X being imposed on Y,** simply follow this despised method and add the suffix to an adjective or a noun. (So you know, among people who really care about this sort of thing, those who favour -ize consider -ise disagreeably French, while those who favour -ise consider -ize, though Greek, disagreeably American. You will grasp that with so much prejudice floating about, it is encouragingly hard for you to go wrong!)
In short, there is endless ‘ize-izing’ or ‘ize-ising’ or ‘ise-ising’ out there to enthuse you. And because slapping -ize or -ise on the end of a word is an easy trick, should you allow yourself to be enticised** down this path—and once having evoluted** your methods and reliabilised the execution—you ought to find nothing much to stop you. In 1953, Paul C. Berg listed several new examples of the form that have long since fallen out of use, including dieselise, redundantise and Coventrise, or destroy by aerial bombardment. Like these three verbs, your concoctions may not stick. But rest assured that your slightest effort will stand as a splendid reproach to the gripers, even as they do their best to freeze the common tongue.