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I don't have the time to address this fully right now; I'll just say that I really like number 33: 'You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.' What it's doing on this list is beyond me. It's not like you're going to hear this from every boss in every rah-rah speech at every company. It's just a wonderfully mixed metaphor.
Whenever I see one of these extended pet parades I just wonder what the peevologist could be doing constructively rather than playing Caligula vs. the Waves.
I do have to agree that, however you spell it, incentivize is silly when we have the perfectly good incent with the same meaning.
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Perhaps if you had to work under the kinds of people who use these sorts of expressions...
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old hand
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Did you mean Canute? Or is Caligula v The Waves from Dumas' play or something? (which I've never read)
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the perfectly good incent What's this sandalwood doing in my office? I'm incensed at your attempts to encense me with incense! I specifically requested Chanel No. 5 or L'Air du Temps - you know, real French benefits! And longer coffee breaks so I can have more perks! You receive incentives to incentivize you. What do you get when you're incented? Incents? Incention? Incent only gets 4 hits in onelook - three dictionaries say "to incentivize" and Word Detective
Last edited by Myridon; 06/25/08 04:33 PM.
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Here's a fun game for you to play at your next business meeting.  http://isd.usc.edu/~karl/Bingo/
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the perfectly good incent You receive incentives to incentivize you. What do you get when you're incented? Incents? Incention? Incent only gets 4 hits in onelook - three dictionaries say "to incentivize" and Word Detective You get directives to direct you. Incent gets 460,000 ghits; incentivize gets 242,000. So sucks to the Word Detective.
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[said with best Fraunsh accent] You are ze very seely peeple, y'know...
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Yahr muzzer wuz a hamstair and yahr fazzer smelt of eldairbarries...
and go ayway, or I shall taunt yuu a secohnd tahm...
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Incent gets 460,000 ghits; incentivize gets 242,000. Google does some odd things, but it's particularly odd when you try to compare searches on similar terms. As you say incent 456,000 incentivize 237,000 but incent -incentivize 851,000 The number of pages with "incent" - the number of pages that also have "incentivize" is much greater than the number of pages with "incent" WHAT? so (456,000 - X) = 851,000 X = -395,000 Likewise: incentivize -incent = 574,000 (237,000 - Y) = 574,000 Y = -337,000 Yet incentivize incent = 15,100 +incentivize +incent = 998 which is nowhere near 395,000 or 337,000.
Last edited by Myridon; 06/26/08 04:25 PM.
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I don't know how you got those results..
for me, "incent" gets 461,000
"incent -incentivize" gets 460,000
which means there are 1000 pages which have both words
"incentivize" gets 242,000
"incentivize -incent" gets 239,000
so there are 3000 pages which have both words
at least these numbers are somewhat in the same galaxy.
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As I said Google does some very odd things. The "answers" change if you ask the same query enough times. The answers change if you ask from a different place. The answers change if you ask from a different browser. (There was another case of this on another board and there was some coordinated international experimenting done to show it.)
There was some evidence that over a certain threshold of "popularity" that misspellings and alternate forms may be counted even if you try to exclude them, but no one volunteered to page through half a million hits to verify them all. ;-)
Last edited by Myridon; 06/26/08 05:39 PM.
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Additionally, you should add the 145,000 hits for incentivise to the 242,000 hits of incentivize for 387,000.
And I'd like to subtract the ~10,000 hits relating to a product, Xactly Incent even though it's somewhat apropos. (I generally like to eliminate popular songs, movies, band names, etc. from this type of comparison as much as possible)
Another oddity...
incents only gets 34,900 hits. On the first 3 pages, 90% are misspellings for the smelly stuff (and I'm guessing the anger and the imbue with scent might also be represented).
incentivises 35,400 + incentivizes 30,700 = 66,100 and is unlikely to have been confused with another word
... so incents vs incentiviz(s)es is "estimated 35" vs 66,000?
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Flashing advertisement image deleted by admin., 9/30/08
I love this. It has all of my hated office phrases like synergy.
Skip
Last edited by Jackie; 10/01/08 02:34 AM.
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I'm sorry, skip norch, but that was a serious waste of bandwidth.
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The phrases don't look any better in a flashy spam package.
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Plus, they're harder to consider one by one and they literally waste bandwidth, both here and on the originating site by linking back to that site every time someone loads this page.
Jackie, can you delete or modify that post? If skip norch thinks it's worth the effort to transcribe all of those phrases in simple text format, fine.
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formerly known as etaoin...
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You haven't missed anything yet. It's right up there 5 posts up.
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It looks suspiciously close to spam from some marketing firm. At least their machine is hosting it.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I've put skip norch on ignore, so at least I won't be chewing up any bandwidth.
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I sent him a PM yesterday asking him to cut out the moving part. I said I'd love to see just the list, and that we don't want advertising here.
I'll give him another day, maybe, though I have the feeling this is one of our make-one-post-and-run people.
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this is all I see: I love this. It has all of my hated office phrases like synergy.
Skip
formerly known as etaoin...
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I'm still seeing the whole thing, fwiw.
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this is all I see: I love this. It has all of my hated office phrases like synergy.
Skip You must have a substandard computer, like a Mac. Get a Linux box.
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heh
it shows up here at home. the school content filter (bless its soul) must block it.
I'd say Jackie, that it's time to do the Moderator Thang and delete that image.
formerly known as etaoin...
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enthusiast
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I told my NoScript add-on for Firefox to block the offending URL and now that animation is gone.
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