Almost 6 years ago, I wrote on this blog this article when I first encountered this extension of the meaning of the word 'escalate': Escalating Confusion. I wrote that blog post in 2013. Even today, neither the Oxford Online Dictionary nor the much inferior Merriam Webster online dictionary makes any mention of this new meaning of the word escalate. If online dictionaries are silent on this, you can be sure you wont find any acceptance of this new usage in any of the printed dictionaries which of course can't be updated as swiftly as the online dictionaries.
But two years after I wrote that article, this new usage was observed by the lexicographer Jeremy Butterfield who wrote:
To escalate has latterly gained a novel transitive meaning, which is 'to refer an issue to a manager or superior'.Linguists today no longer frown on back-formations as they used to when prescriptive grammar was the only form of grammar known in the English-speaking world. Grammarians of old were notorious for rebuking very harshly those who used recent back-formations in their writings. Escalate would have been the object of scorn because not only is it a back-formation from escalator, it is a word of very recent coinage. Escalator started life as a trade name in the early 20th century and by the 1920s, it gave birth to the verb form and in less than a hundred years, we see a whole new meaning that is quite distant from its origin.
Although it is true that none of us has any justification for feeling any loathing for escalate, especially when we use edit or donate without any qualms, I cannot help feeling that a large number of people won't take too kindly to this particular extension of the earlier meaning of escalate and I must admit I'm not particularly fond of it myself.
But sometimes our dislike for a word may not be rational. It may be the result of ignorance on our part or just mere prejudice because it's not a word commonly used in the circle we move in. I recall one afternoon a long time ago when I was having tea with a set of boring old people that consisted of very old relations of mine and family friends. Everyone was criticising a young priest who had used the word burglarize in his sermon. I was then only in my teens and I honestly thought the priest had made a mistake. Because the criticisms dished out by all around me were rather severe, I thought it wouldn't do if I remained silent and so I said what I thought was quite witty, 'Those who say burglarize ought to be buggerized'. I expected everyone to laugh but an eerie silence greeted me. Someone coughed loudly. Someone else said you had to be careful with the crumbs - one is likely to choke on them and a third person said something equally stupid. This is why I always avoid the company of serious people or those who are very old. They lack a sense of humour and they take offence easily. I have since made the same joke with many different groups of friends and it's always well received.
But when I was older and more educated, I learnt that both burglarize and burgle are back-formations of burglar. Both came about in the late 19th century and if I'm not mistaken, burglarize might be older by a few years. But burglarize is used exclusively in the US (and hence reviled by anyone who doesn't live there) and burgle in the UK and the rest of the world.
But I may still, if I dare, condemn the newfangled extension of the meaning of escalate as used by the telephone company employee this afternoon or by the Apple salesman (which I wrote about in my 2013 blog post) since neither used it as a transitive verb. But with the current speedy evolution of the language, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Butterfield, with the seeming approval that all modern-day linguists appear to possess, writes in a few years from now that there is yet an even more novel intransitive meaning of the word. These days, when it comes to the English language, anything goes.
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