SMART TALK SMART TALK

By Dr. Dot Pilcrow

PREVENTATIVE: We at the Center for English as a First Language often wonder how this abomination got started. We sit after work in our Fowler Lounge over glasses of shrub or switchel and bemoan the spread of polysyllabificationitis. Being the only facility in this great country that treats this disorder, we feel overwhelmed.
Preventative is a clear symptom of polysyllabificationitis. The word is preventive, and it does just fine without the extra syllable. Notice how it works: The verb is prevent, and the noun forms are preventive and prevention. For preventative to make any sense, the verb would have to be preventate to get preventative, and the other noun would have to be preventation. So stick to preventive if only to avoid sounding as if you quit school at 16, having finally finished third grade.

If preventative actually seems right to someone, ask them if they also say attentative or incentative, and why not.
Polysyllabificationitis may simply show that the speaker or writer is trying to sound more erudite than they are. Nothing like extra syllables and needless words to pretend they deserve more of our time.

A common cheap decoration on adjectives is the letter Y, thus adding an extra syllable for our complete lack of admiration. Brilliance becomes brilliancy. Vibrance becomes vibrancy. Resilience becomes resiliency. Another glass of switchel, please, this time with a bump.

Sometimes, such an invention actually becomes accepted. Crisp is a perfectly adequate word, but as far back as the 1300s, some folks noticed how crispy seemed to work even better somehow. Almost onomatopoetic. It began to see media use in snack food ads around 1960, and crispy went viral, as we say these days.

No preventive exists, nor should it, for such developments in a living language.

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