Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

foolish and intolerable

Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist, 1895, p.109:

Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it is neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp.570f.:

jeopardize. Richard Grant White called jeopardize “a foolish and intolerable word” in 1879, and he was not the only one who thought so. A popular view among American critics in the 19th century was that the proper verb was jeopard, an older word which, according to the OED, had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1600s. The first record of jeopardize is from 1646, but there is no further evidence of its use until it turns up in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828 with the note, “This is a modern word used by respectable writers in America, but synonymous with jeopard, and therefore useless.” Useless or not, jeopardize became increasingly common, both in America and in Great Britain, as a ttempts to ressurect jeopard met with predictable failure. The voices of protest against jeopardize, all of which have been American, began to die down by about 1900, and it was not long before this minor controversy was entirely forgotten. It has now been many decades since anyone found anything wrong with jeopardize.