Ten years ago I came across a book called "Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte. It's a lovely book and in there I discovered the ingenious train graphs from Indonesia which visually display train timetables. These train graphs, perhaps surprisingly, can be used to demonstrate how neutron time of flight spectrometers function.
However I found it rather difficult to pronounce the title without tripping over my tongue, and I suspect I am not alone. But, not long afterwards I heard the first use of the word "envision" to mean "envisage." It really grated with me I admit. And now at the two conferences I have been to this week I find this usage becoming more and more the norm with our North American colleagues. Why has this happened when a perfectly good word already exists ? Is it an example of political utterances where extra (and redundant) syllables are added to words, perhaps to make them sound more dazzling ? It's a mystery.
