Macbeth, understandably, had insomnia. He yearned for the "sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care." Why didn't he hanker for the sleep that knits up the UNraveled sleep of care? Because it would not have properly scanned! There would have been one iamb too many!
Never mind the innocent iambs. They often go astray. We're talking verbs today, and the curious conjuncture of "ravel" and "unravel" offers a place to begin. In U.S. Law Week we could read not long ago of a case in which "the smuggling scheme unraveled." On the other hand, in May, when my old college sweater finally fell apart, it had palpably "raveled," i.e., those venerable threads had become not only "entangled" but also "disentangled." You may stay awake all night, Esmeralda, wondering why "ravel" means "unravel," and "unravel" means "ravel." That's English.
Neither will you get far if you look at the innocent noun "incentive." It was born in the 15th century of good Latin parents. Five centuries later, some mad writer verbed it into "incentivize." Years went by. Other feckless descendants did their worst. This past April it bobbed up in the Corvallis (Ore.) Gazette-Times. There a state legislator remarked upon efforts "to try to incent" foreign corporations to move to Oregon. Aaarghh!
It's easy to applaud efforts to attract new business to Oregon -- or to entice, or lure, or even inveigle foreign corporations to take root in Corvallis. Boosters may properly wheedle, coax, cajole or even sweet-talk a likely prospect. But incentivization, as noun or verb, stretches the bounds of acceptable lexicography. Be gone! Go!
Face it: English is a disorderly tongue. Take the "-end" words. The past tense of "bend" is "bent," and the past tense of "spend" is "spent." It is also "lend/lent" and "send/sent." Why, then, is it "mend/mended," "fend/fended" and "tend/tended"? This is probably because it would sound odd to say that Bo-Peep tent her sheep and Cinderella ment her sister's gowns. What do you do with "blend"? You ask for honest bourbon instead.
Past tenses are troublemakers. Some months ago the copy desk of the San Antonio Express-News fell into a lively debate over the past tense of "to show." The controversy arose over an interview with the widow of a late officer in the Air Force. He had won seven Air Medals and a Bronze Star -- awards "he had never showed her." Should it have been, "he had never shown" her?
Semantically speaking, there's not a penny's worth of difference in the two verbal forms. Four of my six everyday dictionaries give the nod to "shown." Encarta and Random House prefer "showed." Copy editor John Means would have voted at the Express-News for "he had never shown." I might have copped out with "they were awards he had never told her about," but a nit-picker in Seattle would have complained that I was ending a sentence with a preposition.
Move on! In an editorial, The Washington Post spoke of evidence that "has proven an innocent man had been wrongly convicted." Should the verb have been "has proved"? To my surprise, all six dictionaries say "yes." Has proved! It's unanimous! Bartlett's Quotations recognizes not a single "proven." The biblical Concordance scores it Proved 15, Proven 0.
You win a few, you lose a few. I would have voted for "proven" on grounds of cadence. The Post's writer achieved a nice dactylic ripple when he wrote of evidence that "has PROV-en an INN-o-cent MAN had been WRONG-ly con-VICT-ed." Every professional writer loves the duck-billed dactyl. They eat very little and make wonderful pets.
(Readers are invited to send dated citations of usage to Mr. Kilpatrick in care of this newspaper. His e-mail address is kilpatjj@aol.com.)
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