Language is a living thing, but...

A commenter writes to me, in response to one of the first posts I ever wrote (2005), about the word sindicación, the Spanish calque of “syndication”:

“adhocracia isn’t in the dictionary (RAE) either”.

I could have deleted it, but I left it, because I don’t know what the person intended.

Clearly it’s someone who has read other posts of mine about adhocracy, and apparently wants to reproach me for using that neologism while complaining about the use of sindicación.

The truth is that he clearly hasn’t read my post all the way through, or hasn’t understood it, as tends to happen (is-it-true-that-80-percent-of-blog-readers-dont-understand-what-they-read).

Or maybe it’s someone who just wants a fight, stirring up controversy, which is why I’m raising the troll alarm. Because if we want blogs to be valuable, and out of respect for the people who visit this space, it’s our duty to look after the environment and fight those who want to distort what blogs are for (instead of complaining and ranting about how bad blogs are for society).

On that point, I go by what Carlos says:

…if comments aren’t moderated, blogs go through a process of trollification 2 , in which little by little the most fanatical, most intolerant elements, the ones who like to argue with their ears plugged, start to dominate the discussion and, worse, to push out the people who have a genuine interest in dialogue…

You can complain, and rightly so, that I’m pretty annoying about this business of using words properly. But I’m not someone who is closed to new terms.

If you read my post on sindicación, I ask what to do with this neologism, and I even propose “sindicación web” as an alternative. But that’s what I thought in 2005. These days the subject no longer worries me, it’s quite common for the word sindicación to be used in the sense of syndicate, and the RAE will probably add another meaning to the word down the road. You never know.

Language is a living thing, but that doesn’t mean we have to kill it!

As Hector Velis Meza says:

“…language is a living thing that grows and is enriched over time and by people’s imagination. The dictionary is full of good examples of words that are the product of ingenuity, wit, charm and lucidity. I have always believed that one should keep an open mind to changes when they are the product of talent and creativity, but not when they arise from ignorance, lack of knowledge and above all bad language.”

As for the word adhocracy, “..it is the absence of hierarchy, and is therefore the opposite of bureaucracy. It is a hybrid word made from ad-hoc and the suffix -cracy. The term is used in the theory of organizational management…” (according to Wikipedia, consulted today, March 16, 2009).

It has been used by Alvin Toffler, and by Howard Rheingold (I learned the term in one of his books), and indeed it still doesn’t appear in the RAE dictionary, just as the word software didn’t for a long time.

Maybe it’s all just in my head, so, sue me.