When Being Creative with Language Goes Wrong

I cringed recently when I saw a post on the political blog DailyKos that contained this sentence:

As this article and an earlier one in the New York Times elucidates, there were at least three other career NSA employees, and a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, who shared Drake’s apoplecticy. [Emphasis mine]

No, “apoplecticy” isn’t a word. It wants to be, but it isn’t. It’s an abortive attempt to noun a verb – a tragedy compounded by the existence of “apoplexy.” Come to think of it…can you even “share” apoplexy? (“Hey, Don, can I borrow some apoplexy?” “Sorry, Drake, I used all mine up on the Gulf oil spill last week.”)

I don’t mean to pillory this author. Let he who has never mangled English cast the first stone. I’m citing this because it’s a good example of how the desire to be inventive or seek economy of expression can get the better of us, leading to constructions that aren’t useful, but plain wretched.

Of course, plenty of folks would argue that my verbing of “noun” above itself presages a literary Apocalypse. Verbing is the subject of Wordnik founder Erin McKean’s recent article in the Boston Globe. McKean comes out firmly on the side of verbing, even in a business context:

Some of the outrage might be connected to verbing’s popularity as a feature of business jargon: Liase, incentivize, leverage, and status are often cited as horrible bizspeak to be shunned at all costs. (Why are businesses supposed to be superefficient in everything but their use of language? “He didn’t have a chance to status us before he left” is four words shorter than “He didn’t have a chance to give us a status update before he left.”)

I agree, in theory. Language is dynamic, and authors shouldn’t be shy about extending it, so long as their intended meaning is clear. But there’s no reason to noun verbs that already have noun forms. That’s just lazy. In McKean’s example above, “status” doesn’t convey additional meaning; it’s a linguistic secret decoder ring that establishes the speaker as part of an in-group or clique. “Update his status” may be three words as opposed to one, but it also conveys its intended meaning while avoiding the alienating feel of jargon. And if you’re aiming for word economy, there’s always “apprise.”

I’m fine with creating new words – but not before using the ones we have.