The New Yorker:

Novelty coinages are good at grabbing attention in the digital economy. What do they really have to say?

By Lauren Michele Jackson 

half-formed thought feels worse than an empty head—the tip-of-the-tongue sensation, the inkling of a there there without the foggiest notion of how to get, well, there. Especially dire is when the “what” that we wish to articulate feels half-formed itself, something observable yet emergent, for which the masses have yet to find language. But all we have is language, of course, and so we must muddle through, reaching for a word to serve as a placeholder for our idea until something better comes along. Some would say that finding new language is the work of scholars, but in the age of the Internet we may have lost track of who is leading whom. However provisional, the placeholders sometimes stick.

For example: I spent last month hunting for a new apartment in Chicago. All I wanted was a unicorn: an old building in a historic neighborhood, with humane updates and classic fixtures. Instead, I was confronted with a drab and seemingly ubiquitous new aesthetic. Like any U.S. city, Chicago has been beset by the constipated whimsy of as-seen-on-TV home renos: gray floors, gray counters, and the pallid ingenuity of an open floor plan. The look is “inoffensive, inexpensive, innocuous,” as Amanda Mull described it recently in The Atlantic. Call it, as the headline of that piece does, the “HGTV-ification of America.” Have you noticed it, too? Not the gray laminate but that suffix: “-ification.”

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