Compound

It would be a great job, wouldn't it? And someone, somewhere, must have it. Official inventor of words for new things.

I don't mean the natural evolution of language and the emergence of new words, absolutely fascinating although that is to me. I'm talking about the purposeful naming of something new. As our language is already formed, we tend to use compounds for this (moon-walk, handset, mail-order). 

I saw a beautiful illustration of the power and impact new word-combinations can have, in one of the Poems on the Underground recently called Whalesong.  Do click through and read it: it made my day.  There are also the irritating, lazy ones (Brangelina, J-Lo, Tom-Kat) created to keep the character-count down in a world which feeds on vacuous celeb-goss (see, anyone can do it!) that will fit onto a mobile phone screen.

The one that's intriguing me lately though is waterboarding.  See, this is wrong. It sounds like it's going to be fun: some sort of combination of snowboarding, wakeboarding, water ski-ing. How can something that sounds so fresh and sportive and outdoorsy be so hideous and sinister? It doesn't hint at any of the threat or terror. Call me cynical, but I reckon it's a deliberately inocuous term so that it can be discussed and used as if it were something quite reasonable.

I had a client once who had a warehouse on his site full of barrels. What's in these unmarked barrels? By-products from the nuclear processing industry. But you don't have a license to keep or transport nuclear waste here, do you? It's a decommissioned site.  It's not nuclear waste, he said. We don't have a license for that. It's strategic material. See?