Last week’s column sent a couple of acquaintances to the dictionary to keep me honest; I’d used the word “sublime” as a verb, in the context of causing a solid to convert to a vapor, and back again, with the application of heat.

Granted, to sublime something is not an expression one hears every day, except in laboratories. Nevertheless, these friends, who at first challenged my use of the word, managed to work it into a later conversation. But their tone indicated disdain, as if to say, “Yeah, sure, you think you’ve coined a word and expect us to fall for it,” rather than “Gee, I never thought of that.”

One of them then brought up her pet peeve, namely gluing “-ize” to words that shouldn’t have such attachments. For example, it’s acceptable, and even efficient, to choose “hospitalize” in place of “admit to the hospital,” or “politicize” in place of “inject politics into.” These terms are fine, and we have many of them. But why utilize “utilize” when we should use “use”?

Do words like “incentivize” and “concretize” qualify? Can we take two- and three-word combinations, hybridize them, where they cling like fatty tissue to the arteries of the language?

One experience with the fairly horrible “-ize” syndrome came last week when a relative who’s into sales met a friend and me for dinner. My friend didn’t want to get stuck paying the tab and said, “Couldn’t you just income-tax-ize the meal?” Clearly he meant for the salesman to deduct the dinner as a legitimate business expense, but did he have to take such liberties with “income tax”?

Of course, the IRS forever has been taking liberties with our money, behaving as if it’s bestowing a huge boon by simply returning (some of) our cash. So maybe my friend’s expressionizing is well taken.

What about “concretize” in lieu of “making something concrete” or solidifying it, or (and I’m not making this one up!) “literate-ize our students” so they all can graduate? The “literate-ize” prize is compliments of a staff meeting in which I participated a while back at a college.

Charles Harrington Elster, an author, calls the “-ize” family of words part of a larger grouping known as “vogue” words, which are “what lazy people reach for when they don’t have anything useful to say.”

We hear these expressions regularly — at meetings, conventions, family reunions. One of Elster’s examples speculates on how vogue word devisors would render the passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.”

But parsed by a bureaucrat, Elster says, the biblical passage, recited at weddings, would likely read:

“Despite the fact that my communications skills have been test-marketed and proved to be completely effective in a variety of goal-oriented management environments, if I have not developed the crucial ability to personally interact with fellow colleagues in a highly sensitized manner, non-terrestrial data suggest that my interactive verbal processing ability will not have a positive impact outcome-wise at this particular point in time even in a win-win situation.”

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A column on “Ghost Town Basketball” mentioned a tournament in 1931 in which Las Vegas High and Cerrillos High School each tried to lose, in order to go to the lower bracket and delay a dreaded game against St. Michael’s, the bracketized favorite.

The late Bill Wertz, a tennis champion and owner of a sporting goods store on the site where part of the Optic building now stands, competed in that game. His son Bruce provided a copy of an article in a 1967 issue of the Optic.

Then-sports editor Jim Maldonado conducted an interview in which Bill Wertz said, “If we won, we had to play St. Mike’s. But the other team wanted to lose also. So throughout the entire game we sat around and played anything but basketball. We read comics and kicked the ball away if it happened to roll our way.

“Finally, the members of our team decided that one of us in the final 30 seconds of the game would dribble downcourt and put the ball in the other team’s basket. This guy on our team, Alex Griego … shot and missed. He didn’t miss purposely; he just missed. “So in the overtime, both teams shot at each other’s baskets. We beat ourselves 4-2.”

Scores that low generally get reserved for hockey, soccer and baseball, or my Oakland Raiders. At that particular point in time, the elder Wertz could never have claimed to be in a win-win situation. How about lose-win? Definitely.

I sneaked in the expression “at this particular point in time,” which appears to have survived any editorializing via my editor’s blue pencil.

“At that point in time” means “then”; “at this point in time” means “now.”

By extension, it won’t be long before people begin using “at this particular place in space” as a six-word substitute for “here.”