I thought things were bad when “impact” became a verb. I cringed when I first heard “incentive” turn into “incentivize,” or even worse, “incent.” I’m not sure when nouns lost their clout, but here they are, getting verby all over the place.
Add to that the influence of technology, and we have a whole new language. Where were we without “Google?” And how could we have possibly conveyed humor without “LOL?”
This past week I was hit with an onslaught of new linguistic configurations. A colleague told me she was leaving her job to join a company that specialized in “gamification.” (Looking that up, I see it relates to marketing around a rewards principle; I think we used to call that “promotion.”)
Leafing through the grilling issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine , I noticed that a person can marinate with brine, thus the term “brinerate.”
In Timothy Leary’s esoteric Design for Dying, he uses “cyborgization” to describe the replacement of body parts. I’m not sure which is scarier — the concept or the word.
Yup, words have gone bad, and we careless, linguistically lax individuals are making the situation worse. We go to business meetings and come back with buzz words that make us feel smart. So we use them a lot. Soon they migrate from boardroom to water cooler. Folks start talking about “forward and backward leaning media,” “long and short tail experiences.”
Actually, the staff at Miriam Webster adds dozens of words to the dictionary each year. It’s interesting to see what now falls into the common lexicon. Terms that used to be reserved for scientists and mathematicians, for example, are commonplace. If “giga” is too small, we simply invent “ginormous.”
Yup – my Spell Check is lighting up like a Christmas tree! Clichés and coined terms seem to be easily accepted but the newer selections are still unapproved. I can type “WYSIWYG” without getting a red underline because Microsoft Word obviously knows that What You See Is What You Get, but does it recognize “Activia” (i.e. yogurt with a marketing spin)? Nope.
Remember “Farfenuggen?” (OK, I can’t spell that either) That was an ad agency-contrived word designed to convey the “Germanness” of Volkswagen. (See, I can invent words, too) I thought it ironic that a house guest who happened to speak German failed to see the humor.
I know I’m not alone in observing the language shift. At a recent Media Innovation Day sponsored by the Boston Ad Club, speakers from Droga5 — a highly innovative ad agency — talked about their reality-plus-media-mix partnerhsip campaign for Microsoft’s bing, Random House, and Jay Z. In alluding to their competitor, Google, one posed the same question I ask: “How do you fight against a verb?”
But maybe the verbization of nouns and blatant word creation aren’t so bad after all. I mean, why sit on the couch with your uncreative cookie and dog when you can “couchify” a Snickerdoodle with your Labradoodle. Couch + cookie + dog = boring. Oodles of doodles enjoyed on animated furniture are much more fun.
Tags: buzz words, cliches, Language, new words, nouns, slang, techno babble, verbs
Categories: Colorful phrases, Grammar, Language, Word use, buzz words, lingo, technical terms