I've gone around for years hectoring people never to write "utilize" when they mean "use." To me it's the ultimate garbage word, worse than all your "leverages" and "proactives" combined.There's nothing like self-righteous certitude to keep you from actually looking something up. But eventually I got curious, and it turns out there's a reason for the damn thing after all. A very tiny, very specific one. For most utilizers, it's no excuse.
Take a step back: What do you do when you "-ize" something? You transform it into something it wasn't. Bad guys in old Tom Clancy novels "weaponize" viruses - they turn them into weapons. Ron Popeil "monetizes" weird ideas that come to him in the shower - he turns them into money. What do you do when you "utilize" something?
You turn it into an util, of course. Or, for veterans of high school French, "un outil" - a tool. When you utilize something, it didn't start out as a tool, but you turned it into one. You make it useful in a way that is not part of its ordinary function. Eureka.
So:
I was going to use a screwdriver, but I couldn't find one so I utilized a butterknife instead.
The remote control was missing, so I utilized my shoe.
I'm ready to call this the ultimate exception that proves the rule. It applies so seldom that most uses of "utilize" are still wrong, and I get to remain a copy-editing curmudgeon.
All Articles