Kate Constable's Blog

Abominable Words!

Why, when there are so many stupendous, expressive, vivid and neglected words in the world, do people insist on using abominable excrescences like incentivation and motivising?

My husband works in the public service, and he often brings home beautiful examples of this kind of thing. To be fair, it's usually not so much the individual words that are offensive, but the way they're combined to produce a jaw-dropping, eye-glazing litany of incomprehensible tedium: vertical skill-sets, quantitative easing, negative growth, etcetera.

But this one has to take the biscuit. From an IT memo: "design and productionalise." I'm guessing they meant produce, or hey, what about simply make? Or create? All perfectly good, straightforward words, which don't deserve to be abandoned.

No doubt someone will tell me that productionalise has a special, technical meaning, and no other word will do. But you know what? I don't believe you! I think people use language like this because they don't want anyone else to understand what they're talking about. And the main reason for that is that they don't understand what they're talking about either!