Message just received today from the Veterans Administration:
Veterans receive a 10% discount on the lowest available rail fare on most Amtrak trains.
Use the Fare Finder at the beginning of your search on www.amtrak.com and select ‘Military Veteran’ for each passenger as appropriate to receive the discount.
In regards to airline mileages expiring, SW Air’s do not.
I think some of you are a little mixed up on the purposes of discounts. Discounts are offered to incent people to try the train whom otherwise might not consider it due to price. Same reason car rebates are offered. It is an attempt to increase patronage.
Also, Amtrak eliminated completely the Veterans discount, Congress instructed Amtrak to restore it and Amtrak did so. According to Mr Anderson’s testimony before Congress it takes a min of 90 days to offer or withdraw discounts due to the complexity of programming them into Amtrak’s Arrow Reservation system.
The verb is not ‘incent’, it’s ‘incite’. We’ve gone down the rabbit hole ruining English with too many of these nitwitted back-formations to tolerate this now. Go ahead and use it in quotes if you want, but not straight as though it’s proper standard written English – because it is not.
That, in a nutshell, is what I think most of Anderson’s ‘machinations’ are designed to achieve. (BTW I expect the ‘toys for tots’ crisis to be resolved exactly the same way, with exactly the same Congressional action and probably with some quiet waiver of all such activity from the ‘profitability’ mandate…)
Congress said in 2015, in essence, “Make it pay OR ELSE.” Rather than keep begging for allowances, Anderson says “OK, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll set up to do” … with the understanding that if it squeaks enough, Congress will grease it; if it doesn’t, the money gets saved or the underlying condition gets removed.
I’m watching with great interest what Amtrak’s response to what Delta announced will take effect November 5th will be. Both the reported method of finding and then assessing choices in setting up their new ‘incentives’ and the actual improvements to be made are interestingly applicable to Amtrak coach and business class, and not just on LD services.
He did not mean “incite” at least I hope not. Preferably he should use incentive as a noun and say, "provide an incentive for people to use… " As an alternative phrasing , he could use one of those bastardized noun-verbs (since 1960), “incentivize.” Ugh!!
It’s an older meaning of the word, but still the basis for where ‘incentive’ historically comes from. “Incentivize”, as you note, is just wrong, and to use it he’d be doubling the sin of putting ‘incent’ in quotes to show he understood it wasn’t a standard thing.
It’s really only his use of the word as if correct that I objected to, a bit like I don’t like to see ‘surveil’ used, although the correct word to use in its place no longer has the correct semantics for the usual context anymore.
I use, exactly as you indicate, a construction with ‘incentive’ as noun even if it’s a bit cumbersome at times.
Your actually incorrect the correct verb was “incent” look it up in the dictionary. Incent as to give people incentive. Using “incite” would be fairly crappy grammar.
verb
US
verb: incent; 3rd person present: incents; past tense: incented; past participle: incented; gerund or present participle: incenting
provide with an incentive.
“it makes sense for the government to incent people to invest in research and development”
Suggest that before you comment on matters of grammar or usage you comprehend things like, say, the correct form of ‘your’ in your sentence, or the spelling of words like ‘railfanning.’ Or the proper use of commas and other punctuation. You should stick to criticizing … whatever it is that you do better than writing.
Tolerance of back-formations is not the same thing as finding the etymological basis for a word like ‘incentive’, which means no more ‘something that incents’ than ‘surveillance’ means ‘the act of surveiling’. Had you actually gone beyond looking up ‘incent’ and actually looked up ‘incentive’, you would find that its origins (Latin incentivum) are quite different.
You are perfectly correct that using ‘incite’ would be crappy in place of ‘incent’, as it no longer has the appropriate current meaning, but please note that’s not what I said should be done… and if I left that impression, let me haste to correct it. (In case anyone is going to bring up ‘incense’, that appears to be fairly radically different, too)
Perhaps others need to realize that I and Overmod and Deggesty and others are language purists. ‘Incent’ was derived from the long-standing noun + verb syntax ‘give an incentive’ in the 19th c. and only in the US,
The English language, in all its permutations (USA, Canada, England, Australia, etc.) is among the most dynamic of languages in the World - creating new words and idioms and syntax on a daily basis. The recognized Dictionary’s of the language put new words into their publications every year, they also revise some of the definitions of words as their meanings have been changed by their evolving common usage.
Grammar Nazi’s are fighting a rear guard action trying to stop the continuing evolution of the language and how it is used, they are losing.
Look who is giving grammar lessons.[:D]
Obviously, but that’s no reason to give up the good fight against language barbarians. And stop trivializing the acronym Nazi, please. A lot of people lost their lives to those scum.
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That may be a new all-time record for number of simultaneous new postings of the same basic thing. Musta been a software ‘upgrade’ recently… or need for a poster upgrade…
Don’t expect me to EVER stop pointing out misuse of the greengrocer’s apostrophe, which is wrong no matter how much we propose to let the language devolve. As is use of an apostrophe to imitate a correct plural. [D)][:)]
Just because a dictionary ‘recognizes’ a word doesn’t mean it ‘should’ be used in Standard Written English. There’s no doubt, for example, that the word ‘gift’ as a verb is well-enough established to see print; there is equally no doubt that any educated reader seeing it will react just as Fowler did in the '20s to the ‘Wardour Street’ misuses he so deplored.
To be honest, I don’t object to the term ‘grammar Nazi’ because it has such an established provenance as a term and a trope. It no more cheapens history than Wayne’s earlier note that ‘Nazi’ itself is an insult. (And do we object when discussing Seinfeld’s soup character?)
I’d argue that there’s a difference between a full-on grammar Nazi and a ‘comma cop’, but I find the semantics somewhat distressingly ambiguous…
I move we get back on the subject of Amtrak discounts and their proper application to fairness and to marketing…
Trying to read ‘proper English’ of the 15th Century, in the 21st Century is a agonizing experience. I suspect reading 21st Century ‘proper English’ will be equally agonizing in the 25th Century. Languages move on or die.
This was actually a major concern in the early days of digital libraries (when, for example, we thought “permanent” glass WORM discs and the like were a sensible archival choice). One of the general themes was precisely that much of the necessary semantic drift that made, say, Middle English such a pain for modern readers won’t be present as long as “Information Age” technologies keep some version of SWE common … or are capable of converting one version to another on the fly. This was before the wonderful innovation of things like the IBM “Writing to Read” program, which stress expression and creativity over knowing grammar and notation conventions. (“There will always be editors to fix those niggling little details…”)
And, indeed, that’s a point made extensively with respect to Internet boards: that it isn’t important to observe grammar or rhetoric conventions as long as the posts are comprehensible.
But, as with Sam Kinnison on the subject of same-sex necrophilia, just don’t go calling it normal any more.
To take up Balt’s original point in a different way: even in the 1970s we were able to write effective translators from Middle or Old English into reasonably contemporary, and often directly readable, SWE as that was then described. Perhaps needless to say, it will be dramatically simple for coders … perhaps AI by that point … to write translators, perhaps on the fly, that adapt any inputtable text to some other format … whether ‘marching morons’ devolved or hypercomplicated on the other side of some singularity or other.
And if civilization falls, or the
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You’re right. But I didn’t expect the thing was going to take the turn that it has. (Not meant as an excuse for continuing.) Had I known it would have gone where it has, I’d have held my figurative nose and gone on… no, probably not, I’m too much the ‘comma cop’, but you’re right that most people coming here to read about Amtrak discounts aren’t going to care about points of English grammar.
Someone needs to get back to the thread topic. Since I see you’re not going to be the one to do it, let me reiterate that I think we should get back to posts about the discounts.