Alphabeticisation ?

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Apr 18 06:14:46 EDT 2008


We should caution non-native speakers to be a bit careful with this English
technique of forming different parts of speech out of words!

Its a practice frequently poked fun at.   Its commonly found in
police-speak.   '-ize' is a common culprit, as in 'alphabeticize'.  But also
as in 'mirandize' (to inform a suspect of his rights, in the US, in which we
make, or try to make, a transitive verb out of the name Miranda).  

'-ate' is another.  As in the need to exclude the public while we
'forensicate this crime scene', which has caused excessively literate people
to burst out laughing when they first heard it.

You notice the common practice of adding extra syllables, usually  '-ic' as
in 'alphabeticize' which really adds nothing to 'alphabetize'.  

W. V. Quine as an arbiter of usage, well, that's another story also.  It was
Quine who invented the doctrine of the indeterminacy of meaning, according
to which, it was impossible to be sure what exactly he had said in it.   Not
coincidentally, Quine's version of propositional calculus also ran headlong
into paradoxes of self reference.   Its a fairly perilous authority to cite
in a forum dependent on precision....  

So one's advice would have to be, whatever you do, try not to compilate or
revolutionize any of your code, and do especially avoid revolutionicating or
compilicizing it!
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