Flustrated? If it ain’t a word (and I’ll admit, I may have just picked it up somewhere and THOUGHT I made it up) then it should be a word.
Turdiness
A typical English word generally does not fill more than one syntactic role in a given sentence; words that are also sentences are not usually found in English (aside from, like, “no,” “yes,” “fuhgeddaboutit”). There are languages that do create very long words that contain all the necessary syntactic roles necessary to express a thought, but it’s not typical of English.
Note the weasel words; I do not mean to say that there is some objective, ‘official’ idea of English, only that as commonly used, English exhibits certain patterns, one of which is that a discrete word generally only satisfies one syntactic role in a given sentence. It is possible, however unlikely, that the patterns in English could change over time until it is accurate to say that a word can fill more than one role in a sentence at a time.
That said…Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
But if a neologism satisfies the necessary conditions to be a plausible word in English, then there is no reason it can’t be a word.
For the record, I love the word flustrated.
Can’t I?
No. If it were a word, though, it would be one of those rare words that you can smell coming from a mile away.
Nobody said that a clear meaning is the only requirement for a word. It has to follow its language’s rules, too. There’s clearly no way that a word like “justbecauseicangetamessageacrossdoesnotmeanitisaword” could fit in the English system. Is it a noun?
“Last week I tried to brush my justbecauseicangetamessageacrossdoesnotmeanitisaword, but it ran off.”
Is it an adjective?
“Sharon said I should wear my red sweater, but I think my justbecauseicangetamessageacrossdoesnotmeanitisaword sweater matches my jeans better.”
Is it a verb?
“I will justbecauseicangetamessageacrossdoesnotmeanitisaword the document to you just as soon as I get a chance.”
I could go on for days, but I don’t have to, because “justbecauseicangetamessageacrossdoesnotmeanitisaword” doesn’t even have a clear meaning as a word. It’s obviously a sentence. Care to try again? Or, perhaps, produce some reputable evidence that “orientate” violates some rule that “orient” doesn’t? For what it’s worth, “orient” (the verb, not the noun) comes from French; if anything, “orientate”–since it was derived correctly according to the rules of the English language by native speakers–is the “more correct” English word, if you’re going to argue that one is superior to the other. (I won’t, BTW.) Or is it simply that the older word is the better one? Why not go back to Old English while we’re at it?
I’ve always wanted “obnoxion” to be a word. As in, “That annoying guy was at the bar again last night, and this time he descended to even deeper lows of obnoxion.”
It looks more elegant to me than “obnoxiousness.”
How about
insensical
incensical
incencical
I’ve always felt that “eaves” should be regarded as a plural with the singular being “eaf”.
I just like the sound of it. Eaf. Eaf. Eaf.
Fetus- Dude, this is CS if you want to engage in one of the semi-annual debates on prescriptivism/descriptivism, start a thread in GD. There are people who care much more about the issue than I, who will be happy to engage you. Or if you want to yell at somebody start a thread in the pit. Sheesh, I thought it was safe here in CS to engage in a little light hearted banter without all the lecturing…
ETA: If it helps, I will withdraw my little anecdote about my experience in the millitary and restrict my previous post to a non-judgemental response to the OP. You can disregard everything other than my submission of “orientate” as a word that I think should be a word.
People are responsible and reasonable. Those qualities are called responsibility and reasonableness - not reasonability.
No, I’m not one of those little minds whose hobgoblin is foolish consistency (“we have mice, so why don’t we have hice?”). I just happen to find reasonableness an awful mouthful. There’s something fumbly and lame about saying -ableness when you could say -ability.
Nnnnnot quite. “Word Fugitives” doesn’t accept any word that isn’t either a cutesy pun on an existing word, or a droll combination of two existing words.
Of course they don’t state that policy up front either, so I guess no big deal. Maybe we could say the column professes to fulfill the purpose of this thread. Anyway, on with the thread.