Since I’m such a fervent lover of most words, it makes sense that there’d be a few I dislike, too. Intubate is one of these. It’s not in my list of the top five most detestable words of all time (I’ll eventually get to all of them, if not all at once), but it’s definitely up there. And it’s not because I dislike its meaning, sound or etymology, or because I get skeeved when I think about it happening, either.

It’s because I envy its easy construction and wish we could make more verbs this way. It’s so simple: preposition + noun + suffix “ate” (which derives from the Latin word for “to do”). I’ll grant that, in English, we often make verbs from noun-or-adjective + ate/en/ite/ize, but none seem so smugly simple as intubate. And I think it’s the preposition at the front end that does it.

I mean, wouldn’t it be great if, instead of saying, “put my shoes on,” I could say “onshoeate myself?” Or perhaps I could intrunkate my brief case or the monster of my childhood imagination could underbedate itself.

Two close approximations, off the top of my head, are:

• Insinuate: preposition + noun sinu (Latin root for bend or curve, from sinus) + ate
• Underestimate: preposition + noun esteem (Latin root for value or appraise) + ate

Nonetheless, there are far too few of these. I think, over the next few weeks, I’m going to mentally identify the myriad possibilities for reconjugating our verbs into this format.

To boot, I dislike intubate’s grandiose sense of it’s own importance, but that could just come connotatively from the people who use it (or the fact that it’s an important thing to do in many instances).

I’m off to inbedate myself for the night.

Cheers,

- N