As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.
Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.
And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.
Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."
But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.
Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.
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2 comments:
and, one could argue, staying overnight on a Saturday night, and returning home by Sunday night is *still* a normal weekend break even if you don't include the Friday night.
Then there was the old English motorcycle made by the Ariel company.
It was a square four. The cylinders were laid out not in a vee or inline, but in a square configuration.
It became known as the Squariel.
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