The Laboratorium : Ideate: A Retraction

Nina, more literate than I, has confirmed the legitimacy of "ideate." The term has a respectable history in psychology, where it's a perfectly useful technical term with, it would appear, roughly the force of its dictionary meaning, "to form an idea," or, transitively, "to form an idea or conception of." In fact, the same dictionary check which supplied me with these definitions dates the word to 1610. This doesn't rule out the possibility that the term was first coined by shady j argonistic businessmen, but if that happens to be the case, it does put a bit of a different spin on matters. I don't think the word's long provenance necessarily excuses its use as a dot-com business buzzword, but "ideate" itself is innocent of the charges I levelled at it yesterday.