joemoser1948
New member
I have noticed a trend, particularly apparent in the last 10 years or so (I'd say) to expand perfectly useful words, in an apparent attempt to sound more educated than one really is. At first, I thought it was just a few less-than-well-educated people making understandable flubs. The archetypical example are perfectly-capable police officers (e.g., who walk a beat or ride in patrol cars) who attempt to inflate their language in testimony or arrest reports, to appear more "professional." But then I began to see college graduates using words like orientate, instead of just orient. An example came to me in a YA question today, where the ask-er used the word "cohabitate" and several answerers carried that forward. In researching via the Internet, I found that that word is now appearing in a few dictionaries though many of those merely "define" it by presenting the original word - COHABIT. I can see that many (most) of these "new" words are verbs derived from the nouns that had to be created (e.g., orientation, cohabitation) but I just wondered if anyone sees the same thing I do, or whether it might just be another sign of my growing fogeyishness. (Yes, I know that is an artificially-generated word but I just don't know the correct form of a word for the sate of being an old fogey.)