I have no patience for anyone, but I've lots of time for you

[venta]

There will be some proper content shortly. Maybe.

However... in the interim...

I don't mind people making up words. I do it all the time, after all. But there are some neologisms which just make my skin crawl.

I was reminded of this at lunchtime when a colleague included the word "chillaxin'" in a sentence[*]; it's possibly my least-favourite word from the last few years.

Any advance on chillaxing in the horribleness stakes? Has to be a word with at least some level of usage, not something one of your mates said once.

[*] Admittedly, I suspect he did this chiefly because he thought it would make my skin crawl.

Comments

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Do you mean specifically portmanteaux, or any horrible word? I'm particularly irked by any verbing. It's shockingly common in The Enterprise. "Can we workshop that?", "Will you action this?" et al.

And when the management types abuse terms that are already being abused by programmers. "Let's refactor the schedule!", "Can we have a QA step in the workflow?".

Augh!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Disliking verbing always strikes me as oddly quaint. Do you avoid common verbs like talk, sleep, drink, and stop, all of which are verbed nouns and were once neologisms like 'to workshop' is today? Or, if those are too time-hallowed for comparison: in recent years there's access, email, contact, etc?

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

It feels like the line in the sand is around being either ugly or unnecessary. "To email" feels like a reasonable neologism as the verb form popped-up contemporaneously with the noun. Similarly, your examples seem reasonable as they are both terse and not ugly. (Although do you have any links to the relevant etymological roots? http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=stop suggests that "stop" is an verbal noun rather than vice versa)

Then you get things like "medalling" in the Olympics. Which is horrible, thanks to its homophone also being in-context.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The modern noun 'stop' comes from the verb, but the verb itself comes from an earlier noun (at least, that's my understanding. But I am not an etymological expert.)

Mm, I also dislike 'to medal' for its ugliness: but I don't have that problem with your examples 'workshop' and 'action', both of which I use as cheerfully as I do 'contact'. I think having personal taste objections to particular examples is fair enough, but to decry a whole category of word formation seems a bit extreme.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I wasn't specifically after portmanteaux[*] but I did want new words which are inherently horrible. There's nothing wrong with "refactor" as a word, though I concede that it can be used in various horrible ways. What is it with management types wanting to steal technical words?


[*] Due to typing failure, I nearly wrote "portmanteauz". Which is probably what they call them on da interwebs these days.