The Court of Peeves, Crotchets & Irks opens its summer assizes with a motion from Kenneth W. Rhoads of Seattle. He seeks an injunction against “to reinvent.”

The plaintiff offers in evidence a bale of clippings dating from March 2000. Clearly, a five-year peeve is a peeve of major dimensions. Thus he cites, e.g., an article asserting that the city of Rotterdam “is reinventing itself.” A letter to the editor of The Seattle Times asserts that “reinventing John Kerry is an extremely large order.” In Port Townsend, a jazz series “may have to reinvent itself.”

Mr. Rhoads contends that “to reinvent” is a non-word: “Nothing, once invented, can be invented again. It may be modified, changed or altered, but an original invention is not subject to repetition.”

The plaintiff’s argument is persuasive, but it founders under the weight of precedent. The moles of Merriam-Webster date “to reinvent” from 1686. Random House places first usage between 1685 and 1690 and defines the verb as “to remake as if from the very beginning.” That is not much of a definition, but if “reborn” (1598) passes muster, and “rebirth” (1837) is acceptable in polite company, the court must yield to precedent. Motion denied!

Irrelevantly, the court observes that “rebirth” is defined in part as “metempsychosis,” which is “the passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal.” The court should not be left alone with a dictionary or a rainy afternoon.

J.G. Hunter, writing from South Africa, asks the court to ban “stick-to-itiveness” and “never to be forgotten.” His motion will be granted! The former is a nonce word that serves no purpose not already well served by “persistence or “perseverance.” The latter suffers from bloat.

Mrs. LaVerne Groat of Powell, Ohio, asks for an advisory opinion on the modifiers “fun, funner and funnest.” The court’s advice is to strangle them. In his “Modern American Usage,” Bryan Garner identifies these adjectival abominations as “blemishes in both writing and speech.” At American Heritage, the editors stiffly advise writers to avoid them “in contexts in which a light tone is not appropriate.” The Oxford American Dictionary accepts “a fun thing to do,” but calls the usage “colloquial.” The court calls it spinach and the court says the hell with it.

Robert N. Summers of Las Vegas, Nev., moves for an injunction banning “to orientate.” He cites the story of two Russian cosmonauts who successfully repaired “a gyroscope that orientates a station in space.”

His motion will be denied narrowly and approved largely. As a term of art in geography or navigation, “to orientate” has served a useful purpose since the mid-19th century. There its usefulness stops. The college freshman who has to be “orientated” is a freshman already in trouble. Editors of the New World Dictionary (1991) felt professionally obliged to recognize the existence of the rhinestone verb but brushed it off in five words: “to adjust to a situation.” The court advises writers to eschew it, and then ‘pit it out.

Dr. Stanley M. Kaplan of Cincinnati asks a declaratory opinion on “to utilize” as distinguished from “to use.” The distinction is subtle and probably not worth preserving. We may utilize an old tire as a children’s swing, or a brass spittoon as a planter. We utilize a newspaper for swatting mosquitoes – a function that TV cannot match. In sum, we employ the tire, the spittoon and the paper for unintended uses. But the court inquires: Why bother?

On that rhetorical note, the court takes a brief recess.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.