Thursday, July 24, 2014

A post I came across on the StackExchange English Language and Usage forum today asked the following question:
Is there a word or phrase that means to plant my idea in someone else’s mind so they think it is their own idea?
This is immediately followed by a mention of Inception, of course. I'm wondering if the verb incept couldn't be used for such a task. Transitively, it's an occasional synonym for ingest, though I haven't heard it used that way in recent memory.

Others on the forum suggested insinuate, brainwash, inculate, and suggest. Most of these don't seem quite right as they only include one half of the exchange of ideas; I might suggest or insinuate something without successfully landing the idea in your mind. Inculate is a historical euphemism in English and a current one in Italian, so that one's not ideal either.

The limiting factor is, as usual, mutual intelligibility.

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