Well, this one is not bad, but it is a word I've collided with more often than I expected to over the past year, so it's worth a mention. This word is:
Ideate ( also, Ideation / Ideating )
No, it's not pronounced I-deat, but I-D-ate. Imagine an annoying monster / child / friend has deprived you of your driving licence / passport, and they were very, very hungry.
The OED (love the OED) defines ideate as 'to form or create ideas', and it's first usage goes back to the 17th century. Love that. Still don't like how it sounds. Suspect I'm being pedantic about how words sound, but I like a bit of phonetic clarity.
A friend (A Facebook 'friend') used it a year ago and I liked it then - once I'd looked it up. I tried to drop it into conversation, but it sounded really naff, and so did I. So I stopped.
Just yesterday it erupted at a conference.
Does that mean it is here to stay?
I'll furnish you with a little more context. The speaker was American, highly intelligent, highly professional, high in her organisation, high in middle-age, so generally high, and definitely not in the other sense.
The context was definitely corporate. A multinational departmental conference. Still, does that mean that ideate is back for good, ready to leap like a reborn superhero back into common usage, or will it remain trapped and gurning behind the bars of business-speak?
Has ideate done that American English thing? Having abandoned addled, impoverished British shores long ago for America, to be feted and adored, returning in moneyed form looking for a culturally rich partner, only to have its habits found strange. (Am I getting a bit Henry James?)
Is it really coming back? Well, only time will tell.
There are BAD words here: http://bit.ly/fcB8aa
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