Pet peeve

March 30, 2006 5:33 pm Dave Neary General

Why do Americans utilize the word “utilize”, rather than the less pretentious and simpler “use”?

16 Responses

  1. Catsmeow Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 4:01 am

    What does “pretentious” mean? Is that the same as snobby?

  2. Tack Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 4:11 am

    Yes, “utilize” is one of my pet peeves too. Another one is “whilst.”

  3. Anonymous Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 4:21 am

    In a word: rythmn. Sometimes it makes the beat of what you’re saying roll off the tounge easier than saying ‘use’. It’s hard to properly pronounce ‘use’ because it doesn’t have any hard consonants.

  4. HE Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 4:22 am

    Please, they’re levering their synergy with best of breed untilization for the enterprise.

  5. claudio Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 4:30 am

    Americans or US citizens?

    http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/inf/american.html

  6. Richard Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 5:18 am

    Because they mean different things? While you might be able to use a computer, you might not know how to utilise it. Perhaps you would rather say you didn’t know how to “make use of the computer”, but since I like the word utility, I use (and sometime utilise!) utilise 🙂

  7. otto Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 5:34 am

    Some languages have an equivalent to utilize but not for use (in this meaning), are people speaking these languages pretentious?

  8. AdamW Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 6:38 am

    Nah, American corporate bullshit moved on years ago. They no longer “utilize” things, that’s so 1990s. They “leverage” them (in bold defiance of the fact that the word “leverage” is clearly a noun).

  9. Tom Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 7:11 am

    “utilize” is a bit much, but I don’t think it’s pretentious, I also don’t see it as being very specific to United Statesians.

    Anyways, I happened to be reading the Economist Style Guide and I saw this:

    http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673915

  10. mschaef Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 8:11 am

    Because they have not read this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/020530902X/sr=8-2/qid=1143753043/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-1284423-9291930?%5Fencoding=UTF8

  11. Anonymous Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 9:14 am

    An annoying habit, but not as much as “burglarize” instead of “burgle”…

  12. Tim Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 10:03 am

    We’re the country that invented Buzzword Bingo. Isn’t that enough?

  13. Chris Cunningham Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 10:24 am

    Utilize isn’t half as bad as “societal”. Grah.

    – Chris

  14. Bastien Nocera Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 10:40 am

    Is “utilisation” the same thing as “usage”? It’s not, but then again, I’m more concerned about how our fellow Americans use ‘zeds’ everywhere 😉

  15. tm Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 5:38 pm

    Blame monopoly! 🙂

  16. skierpage Says:
    April 1st, 2006 at 4:47 pm

    It’s awful. People abuse (abutilize?) “utilize” because despite Churchill they think a bigger word is better. Also, maybe “use” looks wrong to people — “uzzee”? “youssee” so they avoid it? I can’t believe “Anonymous” has trouble saying “choose shoes booze lose use”, but spelling them isn’t easy.

    Maybe once in a hundred cases you need to distinguish optimized or effective use (“Students use our networked computers to chat, but we could utilize the grid better”), but the rest of the time USE SHORT WORDS DAMMIT!!

    Wallah/viola, were loosing comprehension because English and it’s alot of idiosyncrasies impact us all with there affect.