... making my judgement as much on aesthetic as on logical or linguistic grounds.
I don't have a problem with that. On logical grounds usually doesn't work. Why prefer bastardization? Logical bastardify and bastardification make more sense, as one makes a bastard. On linguistic grounds, both -ize and -ify are productive derivitive suffixes and so one should be able to use them with any verb one wants to. On aesthetic grounds, here one's on one's own. Bastardization sounds better than bastardification? Not for me. (All those alternating stops and fricatives or liquids.) So, it boils down to: I like this word better than that word. OK. So everybody's free to coin words ad libitum, and nobody gets to squawk.
There might be other reasons, too. I can get behind that. Since we don't have an algorithm for determining a word's acceptability, when you say pearlize is a bastard of a word. Prove it and cite your criteria. That's all I'm saying. It seems to me that most of the grounds used by most of the squawkers are historical and conservative: that word doesn't exist, never has, and I don't like it. Nosireebub!
