Hospitalized

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Professor Benjamin Davis.

I’m the CBS Hero Dow Professor at Florida A&M University.

Yeah, very good.

Welcome to the program, Professor. How can we help you?

I just have a question about the use of the noun hospital. And when it’s turned into hospitalized, the I-E-Z form of it. Now, when I was going through graduate school, I had this great professor, Merv Block, who taught us when writing broadcast not to say hospitalized. He said, use your vocabulary. Say what it is. And, you know, for the world of me, I can’t teach my students that anymore because it’s everywhere. And when I tell them, I say, well, you know, it’s a generally accepted term, but I prefer that you not use it. I’m wondering what you guys think about it.

So his injunction was against using hospitalized as a verb.

Yes.

Did he have an argument?

Yeah, he was really for our using vocabulary. Using words to explain what we’re trying to say. He was sent to the hospital. They are all in the hospital. Hospitalized is something that was really being adopted, I guess, at that time for broadcast reporters. And I guess I never got over his good teachings. So I think I’m either getting really old and I need to get with the times, or maybe you guys have some ideas of how this word can or should be used.

Well, I was going to say the word has sort of been normalized.

Definitely. It’s got a good 40 years on it at this point. When were you in school? Maybe at the time it struck your professor as new.

Actually, what was that, 84? I was at Columbia.

Okay.

Yeah, about 1984. And Merv Block was Walter Cronkite’s writer for many years. So I just took whatever he taught to be gospel.

Yeah, I could see that being really good advice for reporters who tend to slip easily into the jargon of their profession. And they slip into the jargon of the professions that they cover. So if they’re writing about health care, they just pick it up. And some of that stuff is opaque. Or if they’re writing about police situations, they pick up that language. Heck, even the traffic reporters pick up the language of like the, you know, the sheriffs and the traffic, the highway patrol, and they relay that to their audience.

I wonder if his point about hospitalized wasn’t related to trying to drop that journalistic voice.

Right. That kind of tone that journalists tend to take where I’m the, you know, I’m the arbiter of all good things in the world and trying to get you to talk like a normal human being and maybe hospitalized was one of many examples?

Possibly. Actually, that’s what they tried to get us to do there. I don’t know if they succeeded with me, but yes, they were trying to accomplish that.

Well, you sound fine to me, but this isn’t a, this is a different kind of broadcast, isn’t it? This is conversational.

Well, don’t you think that the issue is really the IZE? I mean, I said normalize earlier. I said it’s been normalized and neither of you flinched. But I think that a lot of people get upset when you use eyes after a noun like that.

Right, when you verb a noun.

Yeah. And particularly when you use the I-Z-E to make that noun into a verb. Yeah, this kind of complaint about I-Z-E verbs has been going on for 400 or 500 years.

Really?

Yeah, it has been. But the surprising number of these verbs slip by us, completely unnoticed, unremarked upon, and nobody complains about them. But a few are set aside for particular attention as being especially reprehensible, like incentivize or hospitalized has come up a few times. I believe it was Edwin Newman in one of his books in the mid-70s used to complain about hospitalized and similar verbs.

Yet it’s counter to what we hear from some of our other listeners who want English to be simpler. Why can’t we have just one word for this idea of was admitted to the hospital instead of having to say out the long version of it? And I think Merv may have also been thinking that we were being lazy, and they didn’t want us to be lazy with words. So he wanted you to have some intentionality about your word choices.

But I think having a hard and fast rule against that word maybe isn’t such a great idea. I’m sure we’re going to have some responses from our other listeners about the word hospitalized. Professor, thank you very much for your call.

Oh, you’re quite welcome.

Thanks for taking it.

Okay.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, what do you think about this kind of thing? Call us, 877-929-9673. Send an email to words@waywordradio.org. And we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.