On Language 6/7: My wife’s words
In a changing world of words, you say potato, I say potatoest
Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Here are some of the words and phrases I first heard from my wife, Andrea. Given this level of inventiveness displayed by one person, is it any wonder that language as a whole changes and evolves as much as it does?
Analyzation: combination of “analysis” and “rationalization,” connoting excess, as in, “Don’t ruin the movie with your analyzations.”
Of my three favorite dictionaries, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (MWC) and the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) list “analyzation” as a variant of “analysis,” while the newly released second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) doesn’t have it (though it does have “analyzable”).
A Google search yields about 700 examples of the word. A quick scan of these results suggests the word usually uses a prefix to connote excess, as in “over-analyzations” and “hyper-analyzations.”
Delightful, Nathan! It must be funner living with such a creative neologist than what you could have had with traditionalerists. :-)
Posted by Wayne Leman on 06/07 at 03:27 PM
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