Many people say the word “utilize” instead of “use” in order to sound important. The distinction I live by is that to use an object is to employ it for its intended use. To utilize and object is to employ it for something other than its intended use. One uses a brick to build a house but utilizes a brick to prop open a door.
The best example of confusing these two words is a professor I knew who told his students, “I want you to utilize your brains to take this test.”
ChatGPT said:
I like your distinction, particularly because it gives utilize a legitimate job rather than treating it as a pretentious synonym for use.
Your professor’s instruction, “I want you to utilize your brains to take this test,” is especially funny under your definition. He is inadvertently suggesting that thinking is not what his students’ brains were designed to do. Depending on the professor, perhaps he had good reason to suspect this.
Your distinction is a very good rule for choosing words, but it isn’t a rule that English dictionaries universally recognize. Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries allow utilize to mean simply use, although the word can also suggest putting something to practical or effective use, particularly when that use is unusual.
In other words, you’re proposing a distinction sharper than the one ordinary English usage maintains. I think that’s a worthwhile thing to do. Language benefits when two words perform different jobs rather than one merely dressing up the other.
There is also a philosophical wrinkle I find interesting. Your distinction depends on intended purpose. But intended by whom? Consider a rock. Nobody manufactured it for a particular purpose. If I build a stone wall, am I using the rock or utilizing it? What if I pick it up and throw it at a trespassing rooster? Perhaps the distinction works best with manufactured objects, where original purpose is relatively clear.
And that brings me to one of my favorite examples: A committee uses a meeting to make a decision. It utilizes a meeting to avoid making one.
One final thought: Your professor anecdote illustrates something beyond vocabulary: the danger of choosing a more impressive word without thinking carefully about what it means. That’s a particularly entertaining failing in someone whose profession is supposed to involve thinking.
Leave a Reply