Did He Grammarize "Weaponize"?

 

August 16, 2023

 

I’ve been thinking for some time about writing a post on how annoyingly ubiquitous the word “weaponize” has become. In my mind, it’s primarily used by people who don’t like how someone else is scoring points against them; I think of it as a whiner’s refrain.

 

Enter Joseph Epstein, who wrote a (much longer) column about the word. (It was printed in today’s Post-Dispatch.) The latter part of the column dealt with how “weaponize” has the implication of violence.

 

The first part of the column dealt with the grammatical incorrectness of adding “ize” to nouns to turn them into verbs.

 

You might say he grammarized “weaponize”.