When to invent a word?

Is this really necessary?

Last week Jeff Bezos used the word “complexifier” throwing internet grammaticians into a storm of controversy that almost overshadows the point of his blackmail article. To clarify, “complexifier” is not an english word, but is French for ‘to make more complicated.’ While Bezos didn’t invent the word the use still begs the question: why?

Why go outside of the english language when trying to communicate? Below are a list of reasons to invent a word, use a word outside of the native language of the conversation or mutilate the meaning of existing words.

The most important thing is that the invented word serves a function.

Inventing a functionless word is pretentious gibberish. Words do a lot of heavy lifting so it is necessary they have purpose lest they end up a grammatical Sisyphus.

You need to reference a cultural idea outside of english.

If you read my previous post about sentences you will know that sentences are ideas. What happens when an idea isn’t native to english? To portray this you need to go outside of the language. For example the Japanese “samurai” which refers to a cultural idea that doesn’t exist in native english speaking countries. Using the culturally correct word portrays a deeper, more nuanced understanding in the sentence.

You need a word to play double duty.

Distorting and warping prefixes and suffixes can take an already understood word and make it function as a different type of word. For example, you can change ‘usual’ into ‘usually’ by adding the ‘ly’ as a suffix. Bezos did this twice, turning complex into complexify and then again into complexifier. When contemplating doing this to a word I like to think of my mother, who, when working as a medical transcriptionist her boss (the doctor) asked her to do his laundry. Usually, there is a more appropriate way to get the job done.

You need to juxtapose two words to make a new meaning.

Franken-collaging (a hyphened word I just made up which means to join together with the recklessness and perversion of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein) combines two words and can be done…