Is Concept a Verb?
How to get a word into the dictionary.
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Friday, May 12, 2006, at 1:26 PM ET
If you work in the advertising industry, you may have come across the word concept used as a verb, as in, “He’s the only creative person I ever met that had his ideas concepted, shot and edited the moment he presented it to you,” from a recent issue of Adweek. If you’re not in advertising—and even if you are—you may find this usage extremely unpleasant.
Copywriter Ray Del Salvio is fond of it, though, and has started a series of linked blogs to help promote its inclusion in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Del Salvio’s Verb4Concept campaign has generated a fair number of signatures and a fair amount of criticism. But if Del Salvio is serious about his quest, he needs to change his tactics: Cajoling dictionary publishers won’t work.
The problem is not that his word is ugly. The dictionary is not a popularity contest, at least in part because tastes change over time. For example, many people today take umbrage at verbs that end in -ize, such as incentivize or prioritize. But such aesthetic objections are arbitrary; in the 19th century, critics railed against demoralize, deputize, and Americanize, words in which -ize now goes unnoticed.
continued: http://www.slate.com/id/2141644/
