"Hospitalize"

Free country bro. (still)

I didn't hear the original complaint, but the '-ize' ending has a long and venerable history going back at least to classical Greek and having approximately the same effect then.   Stick it on the end of "daemon", for example, and the past participle ("demonized", in effect) meant to have a demon.   Seems to me to be a useful sort of ending, generally speaking.   Was her objection for '-ize' in general or only for "hospitalize" particularly?

I suspect the popularization of the -ize constructions comes about (like some other language trends) as a result of newspaper editors wanting to abbreviate headlines and news copy. "First lady Hospitalized in Houston" does not need extra verbs, articles or prepositions as in "admitted to a hospital", "was taken to a hospital", etc.

Interesting that you only hear "hospitalize" used in the passive tense.

It would sound very strange if I heard someone say, "I hospitalized my grandmother last week".

Games and tests have been computerized, TVs were transistorized n the 1970s, onions are caramelized, patients are anesthetized, all of these can be active or passive.

JohnS said
Games and tests have been computerized, TVs were transistorized n the 1970s, onions are caramelized, patients are anesthetized, all of these can be active or passive

Half a century ago, a high school girl, in presenting her project, told me that the data were computerized, with such and so the results.I asked her what the computer did and   she got very annoyed with me.   I wanted her to say it was regression analysis   but she didn't know.

You can computerize a process, but you cak.ornhe ewion that does tator the applinot computerize data,   Youms.ight a wll talk about farmers "tractorizing" their fields.' The computer, like the tractor, is a general purpose power source, but the application/implement does the work.