I have been accused in the past of being overly conservative when it comes to the evolution of language. To dispell this myth, I present an initial draft of my all-encompassing rule regarding the evolution of language, and a fine source of news on the continuing march forward of the English language.

First things first: It’s perfectly fine to create new words or extend the use of existing words, but not if you’re an MBA All Star. Now, MBA All Stars. You know who you are. You’re young. You went to B-school. You wear khakis and a blue Oxford shirt every day of your life. You aspire to one day drive a BMW. Most damning of all: you use the word “incentivize” without a hint of irony.

Yes, these are the people who brought us the notion that you can plop “ize” on the end of any word and make a verb of it. This is wrong. It’s very, very wrong. For this, the entire categorization of people has lost their neologism privileges for the rest of time. You heard it here first.

Now, for continuing trends in word and phrase creation, I point to Neologasm. On this site you can find exciting new words like antfucker:

antfucker

n. (Dutch miereneuker, translation into English; via Jeremy Keith)

1. Nitpicker.

Now that is a useful new word. I encourage you to visit Neologasm and learn, for it is indeed good.

And I swear that if any of you antfuckerize this post and go on about “but they have a listing for incentivize over on Neologasm,” HEADS WILL BE FLOWN.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.