Diacritiques

Via the comment thread of Language Hat’s post on yet another questionable column of the NYT “language maven” William Safire — no, I won’t link to his article; Language Hat calls it “a nasty piece of work” — I found a much more promising commenter on language in the mainstream press in Jan Freeman, who writes for the Boston Globe. Read her latest piece on “incent”. I wasn’t aware that incentive goes back to Latin cantare (”sing”), and appreciate her reasonable tone.