There are some words that occur primarily, if not exclusively, in academic discourse. Discourse might be one of those words.

Another one of those words is problematize.

In academia, we problematize things. Outside of academia, we probably just “trouble” them. The word “problematize”—in other words, “to render something problematic”—first occurs in English near the beginning of the twentieth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Now there are people who don’t like “problematize,” who don’t see it as part of a long history of -ize words in English. We have several centuries of -ize verbs in English, both from nouns and from adjectives, either borrowed from Latin or derived in English using the Latin suffix (which itself was originally from Greek).

We also have a long history of people criticizing -ize verbs.

So for example, Benjamin Franklin, in 1760, in a letter to David Hume, says that he gives up the verb colonize because he sees it as bad. Now, we now see this concern as quaint, but the complaints keep going. In the New York Times, in the year 2000, Edward Rothstein wrote an article in which he criticized incentivize as “boorish, bureaucratic mis-speak.”

It’s important to remember when we see a criticism like that of incentivize that that criticism will probably seem as quaint in 50 or 100 years as the criticism of colonize seems to us today.

What do you think? Do you “-ize”? Or do you dislike those new verb forms? Which are your favorites? Which drive you crazy? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This video, produced by Rob Hess, originally appeared in LSA Wire, where you can find an archive of Ann Curzan’s videos on language.