A recent Dilbert, already posted on Language Log:
Mark Liberman posted this to comment on management styles, but there’s also the word bossification.
Derivative verbs in -ify (and related nouns in -ification) are all over the place; most of them are playful and showy — and ad hoc, short-lived. And I’ve posted about them on and off over the years, most recently in a 6/6/13 posting on adjunctification (and banlieuification, skyboxification, and enmification). Since then I’ve collected farmify:
Rooftop vegetable gardens were one thing, but the urban agricultural movement has gone a step too far. A new brand of activists want to incorporate fruit trees into the fabric of city life by turning our limited green space into woody groves filled with apples, cherries and plums.
… By so narrowly defining useful landscapes, the craze to farmify our surroundings has made it all about humans. (Mariellé Anzelone, “Greedy Gardeners”, NYT op-ed piece 6/15/13, p. A19)
And now the Dilbert bossification.
(Note that -ify attaches promiscuously to all sorts of bases.)
January 12, 2014 at 10:04 am |
i knew an old guy in crozet virginia who used to say something out-of-order was “ficklified”.
i wonder if the noun of that would be “ficklifaction”.
January 18, 2014 at 8:59 am |
[…] installment, on bossification, here. Now, a double-header, with Shoreditchification and hipsterfication (plus simple verbing of […]