"Inure," "enure," and the law

Though my family is full of lawyers, I had never heard the legal use of "inure to" until I found myself watching coverage of the George Zimmerman trial the other day, and heard commenters saying things like this (from the transcript of a discussion on CNN):

[Depositions before trial] yield a treasure trove of inconsistent statements. So, that always inures to the benefit of the cross-examiner, like a case like this. 

I knew inure only in the sense of "accustom, habituate," which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1489 (in its common alternate spelling, enure). But the legal inure -- "to take place, have effect; to be available; to be applied (to the use or benefit of a person)" -- is also well aged, dating to 1607. As for the spelling issue, "the form inure has now largely superseded enure," says the OED; "the latter, however, has a long independent history, and has been given separate treatment at ENURE v."

When we find ourselves with a word that has two separate but equal spellings, a common impulse -- at least among the orderly-minded -- is to assign them separate senses: mantel over the fireplace, mantle over the shoulders; insure for buying coverage, ensure for making something happen. But inure/enure has resisted such neatening; the people like inure, but the lawyers can't reach consensus.

H.W. Fowler wanted to tidy up by ditching enure entirely; he thought the word's etymology was so opaque that readers couldn't see the connection between the senses (and indeed, their link to Latin opera "work" is not obvious). Thus "there is a tendency to spell in- & en- for the two meanings as if they were two different words." They are not: "Variant spellings are therefore unnecessary, & -in is preferred by the OED."

But enure persists in legal writing, frequently enough that the website Daily Writing Tips hopefully suggests that "it may be useful to reserve the spelling enure for the legal term." That looks unlikely, since even Bryan Garner -- usage writer, lawyer, and language neatnik -- has no use at all for enure. In The Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, he advises:

 No harm would come of abandoning enure; it wasn't the novel spelling that confused me about legal inure (I was listening, not reading), but the unfamiliar sense. Once I've learned that, context supplies the necessary clues. Similarly, I like using insure for both senses of the word, and though the tradition is fairly well settled now, it's hard to see that the mantle/mantel distinction contributes at all to clarity. But it's never easy for us natural-born sticklers to surrender our hard-learned editorial minutiae.

Duct tape/duck tape, one more time

Is it duck tape or duct tape, and which came first? Michael Quinion of World Wide Words has updated his page on the debate, adding new material and antedating the first unequivocal "duct tape" mention to 1957. (In my last go-round on the topic, in a 2010 Boston Globe column, my earliest cite was 1960.) He also links to new research on the history of duct tape, by a former Scotch tape marketing director, that details the development and naming of 20th-century tapes.

Johnson & Johnson's official story has been that

the original material was developed by the Permacel division of Johnson & Johnson in 1942 as a waterproof sealing tape for ammunition boxes in the US Army. ... Because the fabric backing was made from cotton duck and because it repelled moisture "like water off a duck’s back," it became known to soldiers as duck tape.

It's a good story, but none of us have been able to find a shred of evidence for it, despite the abundance of World War II-era documentation. In fact, "the tapes used by the US Army during the war for sealing ammunition cases and other uses were off-the-shelf brands, including Johnson & Johnson’s Jonflex and Utilitape," Quinion reports. And there's no sign that soldiers called these either duck tape or duct tape; those terms were popularized in the 1960s and '70s.

The issue has long been confused by the existence of early references to "duck tape" meaning cloth tape made of cotton duck, whether stickified for sealing or used for other purposes; during my search I unearthed several old ads for Venetian blinds with ladders made of this woven cloth "duck tape." But it's pretty clear now that both terms, the "logical" duct tape and the (now trademarked) Duck Tape, have reasonable -- and fairly recent -- claims to legitimacy.

Riddle me this: a "bullet-ridden" corpse?

I got an e-mail yesterday from James Alan Fox, who teaches criminology at Northeastern University (and blogs for the Boston Globe), noting an oddity in the paper's update on Aaron Hernandez, the ex-Patriot now charged with the murder of Odin Lloyd. The victim's "bullet-ridden body was found in an industrial park" near Hernandez's home, the story* said.

"I know that ['bullet-ridden'] is sometimes used instead of 'bullet-riddled,' but is it proper?" asked Fox. "You can be guilt-ridden, but riddled reflects multiple holes."

He was way ahead of me, since I had no idea bullet-ridden was in circulation. And he's right: It's quite common to find bullet-ridden when bullet-riddled is (I think) intended. Ridden, after all, means "burdened, oppressed, harassed by": debt-ridden, hag-ridden, conscience-ridden. A riddle is a sieve, so riddled is the word for something (or someone) full of holes; "I was to be made a riddle of if I attempted to escape," says the OED's 1843 citation.

Ridden for riddled could be a retrieval error, a substitution of one word for a similar one by a writer who actually knows the difference. It's not hard to accidentally bunker down instead of hunker down, and so many writers have shimmied up drainpipes (instead of shinn(y)ing) that the new version is taking over. But whether it's an accident or a misapprehension, bullet-ridden has been around for a long time. Google Books instantly gave me a sampling of 19th-century examples like "the old, tattered flags, under whose bullet-ridden folds dear comrades fell" (1868).

Since both ridden and riddled suggest affliction, and their sounds are similar, apparently ridden sounds plausible enough -- especially in this cliched crime compound -- to slide right by editors and readers. Also, as the website Phrase Finder notes, both words go hand in hand with guilt: We can be guilt-ridden or riddled with guilt (or both). The reverse substitution is less likely: Riddled must retain enough of its "holey" sense to keep us from writing conscience-riddled or hag-riddled.

I like to think that in my editing days, I would have noticed a goof like bullet-ridden. But after looking at its history, I'm not feeling so confident. An awful lot of people have read the word, and the dearth of recorded peeving suggests that most of them -- or us -- didn't see anything wrong. 

*The link is to an updated version of the story Fox cites.

Incent dissents

Speaking (as I was here) of the Times's After Deadline blog, this week's edition also included a delightful plea from a reader whose comment (like many of them) was meant only to record a peeve that hadn't been mentioned:

Please, please, please, stop using "incentivize." This is an unnecessary expansion of the perfectly good verb "incent."

Of course, both incentivize and incent have been widely denounced as business jargon in recent years. When I polled Boston Globe readers on their distaste for "new" and controversial verbs, incent/incentivize ranked second (after dialogue). So naturally, another Times reader soon posted a terse response:

"incent" is not a word.

Of course it is a word, like it or not. But more than that, the first commenter is correct on the history: Incent was in print, according to the online Oxford English Dictionary, as early as 1844, in a New York weekly. An expanded version of the citation:

She had been dazzled by the supposed wealth of a gay fellow, and, incented by the stupid ambition of an ignorant mother, she thought that the purse of the one was far superior to the heart of the other.

Yes, this is an American source, but incent didn't remain American: By the end of the century, it was appearing in British texts as well. It didn't make much headway, though, over the decades; as the Google Ngram graph shows, it's the newer incentivize that really caught on. (Attempts to split the difference with incentize have flopped.)



We like to think of those -ize verbs as horrible modern business jargon, but in fact, as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes, they've been catching flak for over 400 years. Some die off (pulpitize, melancholize); some stick around (economize, legalize) and make themselves useful. In any case, it's their novelty, not their -ize endings, that rubs people the wrong way. Despisers of -ize should breathe deeply and recall that one of our oldest -ize verbs, respectably rooted in Latin and Greek, is the 13th-century baptize.