Suffication

Sometimes I despair at some of society's more egregious tendencies. One of them is that of over-suffication, the terrible practice of adding more suffixes than there ought to be.

Take the word 'orient' – used as a noun, it implies the East. Used as a verb, it becomes 'to orient' – to aim towards a specific direction. If you lose your sense of direction, you're 'disoriented'; that is, you are without specific direction. However, modern usage uses 'to orientate' in the sense of 'to allow someone to become oriented'. And then it does a naughty little backflip and creates 'orientation', a sense of direction or a process by which someone develops a sense of direction.

Then people start saying 'disorientated', which I suppose must mean 'the state of having lost one's sense of direction' but certainly should not mean 'the state of having lost the process by which one develops a sense of direction'. It is most disorienting.

The other day, someone said, "Surely you mean 'atheistic', not 'atheist'." Well, I've seen 'atheist', 'atheistic', and 'atheistical'. Would you say 'Buddhist', 'Buddhistic' and 'Buddhistical' as well? Or, 'Communism', 'Communistic' and 'Communistical'? It is like saying '-ism' implies '-istic', which is not necessarily the case.

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In other news, the November issue of Microtome is out. All the books are good!