“Injunct” vs “Enjoin”

Question

The injunctions (and super-injunctions) that occasionally make the headlines restrain a defendant from doing something. It is fairly clear (e.g. OED) that the word was formed as a noun from enjoin in the sense of stop, and has various uses. There is, however, a continuing need for a specific verb in the legal context (The Court granted an injunction to stop him doing it/ he was ???ed from doing it). It is increasingly common for this verb (both in the media and in court) to be "injunct", which is in the dictionary, but only as 'colloq.'. It seems to me that a word that is colloquial (and very ugly) has no place in a courtroom; but since most of the people who use it are High Court judges, I thought I'd see whether fellow EL&Uers agree with me. Is it worth campaigning to restore enjoin here, or indeed is there a better replacement?

TL;DR Injunct is an illegitimate back-formation from injunction, which actually came from enjoin. Is it too late to stop this word polluting our beautiful language?

Answer 1

I think it's far too late to stop the "illegitimate back-formation" injunct from being used as a word. The question of whether/when others will accept this usage is subjective, but for myself I have no problem with it and I think OP's position is peevish.

This NGram shows over a thousand written instances from the second half of the last century, with usage apparently increasing. I would expect there to be far more this century, given the flurry of media interest in legal injunctions over recent years.

I assume the reason @Mr. Shiny and New found no instances of the verb form was because he searched for the present participle/infinitive injunct. Many speakers will sense that there is/was something "not quite right" about the usage, so it's no surprise they still shy away from the bare uninflected form. In any case, most references would naturally be in the past tense, since there's not much reason to write about the activity until it's actually happened.

OP seems to imply that the "purity" of English is somehow defiled by this neologism. Presumably because he has qualms about the "parentage", but I feel this gives the word something of the vibrance and vigour of a mongrel dog.

It will probably remain firmly entrenched in the semantic space surrounding legal injunctions, a term we're bound to be familiar with anyway. So we have an excellent new word available to cover exactly that context, that requires no effort at all to "learn". I only wish all neoligisms were this easy to assimulate into, and thus enrich, our beautiful ever-changing language.

Answer 2

Language changes. That's why we're not speaking Old English anymore. Perhaps the people using "to injunct" feel it's clearer and more natural than "to enjoin".

That said, Google ngrams shows the following:

There appears to be a decline in the use of "enjoin" overall, but no use of "injunct" at all. I can't find any uses of "injunct" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English either. So I think it's safe to say that "injunct" will be considered an error for some time.