My latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, is about two sweary neologisms: enshittify and enshittification. Both were coined within the last year by journalist and author Cory Doctorow, who uses them to describe the current state of certain large internet platforms and e-commerce sites.
Read more about the history and morphology of enshittify and enshittification.
One factor in neologistic success is humor. Circumlocution (of prefixes, suffixes) is part of it, I think. It's kind of a smug, elitist humor. But "embiggen", "enshittification", etc. are funny.
Posted by: Dan Freiberg | February 02, 2023 at 09:03 AM