Made-up Words

By Nick Wright

Don’t make up your own language. If a word doesn’t exist in a dictionary, how can other people understand its meaning?

Have you ever heard of:

• autoised
• billocked
• bloatware
• custodied
• impactful
• incentivizing
• jointery
• mentee
• rebranding
• subjectlets
• trilemma
• vaporware

Such coined words are the sign of a poor writer trying to impress the reader. Most readers just dismiss the message unless you write in familiar words they understand.

Use your spell-checker to find non-existent words. Add only proper nouns to your dictionary and you’ll find it becomes a useful tool to pick up the worst examples of bad language.