Does "ful" really make it a word? Evolving Language Should Unify and Bind - Not Divide and Confuse

Every year, the world’s prominent English-language dictionaries add anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 “neologisms”—newly coined words or phrases—to their pages. For Merriam-Webster and Oxford, it’s an exhaustive process that can involve tracking words from sometimes obscure uses into the mass-market national, and even global, lexicon. 

These arrivals can also be less a linguistic evolution than an etymological eruption. For example, in our fraught times, recent new words and phrases have included “post-truth,” “climate emergency,” “permacrisis,” “quiet quitting” and “anti-vaxxer.” I advocated for creating a word in a 2019 CEOWORLD magazine commentary—“LINC,” or “leader in charge”—to replace the moniker “boss” and its dubious past. 

In business, this process is more jargonistic and informal, and frequently involves what’s been termed “denominalization” by linguists, or “verbing” by others: converting nouns into verbs. There’s “vendorize” and “strategize.” (This practice is also not as new as it may seem, given that Benjamin Franklin labeled it “awkward and abominable.”)

Click here to read the commentary in CEOWorld, penned by WPNT Ltd.’s Stephanie Nora White.