When I hear surveil on the wireless I often imagine it is spelt surveille, since it is a back-formation from surveillance. But the spelling has settled down as surveil. The Telegraph had a report the other day about someone who found his iPhone had been infected with spyware ‘in order to surveil him’. The word sounds unhappy to my ear, as new back-formations often do, though it has been in use for 60 years.
Back-formation appeared in the OED before it had an entry there. Its entry came in the Supplement of 1933, but it was coined by Sir James Murray in 1888 and used by him in the dictionary’s entry for burgle. This was marked as originally colloquial or humorous (as burgling probably was in The Pirates of Penzance in 1879: ‘When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling.’) Burgle was in 1888 ‘a back-formation from burglar, of very recent appearance, though English law-Latin (1354) had a verb burgulare of the same meaning’.
The process is common in English. Buttle is to butler what burgle is to burglar. Is curate, as a verb, a back-formation from curator? Certainly curate, recorded from the end of the 19th century in the sense ‘look after the exhibits in a collection’, is a back-formation from curator. But curator as the person who selects items simply for one exhibition has been in use only since the end of the 1950s. The fashionable curate in the sense of ‘select items in a collection’ appeared in the 1990s and extends to menus. I still can’t take seriously escalate, as in ‘escalate your complaint’, meaning ‘take it to a higher authority’. Wars (mostly) escalate, as a figurative use of the verb, which we seldom use literally in the sense ‘travel on an escalator’. Escalator was originally a trade name for a moving stairway built in 1900 by the Otis Elevator Company for passengers of the Manhattan Elevated Railway. But the word came from escalade, borrowed from French and defined by John Florio in 1598 as a ‘scaling of a wall with ladders’, militarily. After an escalation, it’s hard to climb down.
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