Today many of you are celebrating a birth so I have chosen a related word- nascent. It is an adjective that describes something new. For example “podcasting is a nascent medium.”

It is a latinate and comes from the word nasci which means to be born.

Happy Holidays!

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Remember when I used to do quotes?

Well today we have a quote. It is from an interview with Archibald Leach in 1985.

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

Now if you don’t recognize the name, you are not alone. Archie Leach, by sheer will power, became Cary Grant, one the best actors of all time. According to IMDB.com he starred in 75 films, including two of my favorites The Philadelphia Story & To Catch a Thief.

Yesterday’s word got me to thinking and reading about word creation and where new words come from. This of course led me to a new new word- neologism. It is a word that has two meanings. The first is a new word or term. It can refer to a meaningful word like podcasting or it can be a nonsense utterance of an insane person. The second meaning for neologism is the act of inventing a new word. For example, the MBA types frequently use the word learnings to describe observations or conclusions since learnings isn’t a dictionary word they are unknowingly engaging in neologism.

Any neologists out there? Send me your new words.

Today I got an instant message from Shane at theresistancearmy.com. He asked me about the word commoditise. To my surprise commoditise isn’t a real word. Although Google lists almost 20,000 pages with the word, I couldn’t find one dictionary that included it.

I always though the word was legit and that it meant to turn into a commodity. No such luck. The verb that means to turn into a commodity is commodify. I had never heard this word before.

So Shane and I had a brief discussion about what counts as a real word. In the end we concluded that commoditize will make it into the dictionary if enough people use it.

Back to commodify and commodities. A commodity is a undifferentiated product. Like crude oil, pork bellies or gold. It doesn’t matter who you buy your gold from it is still gold. Now no one want’s the products they sell to become commodified. Commodities are much harder to sell at a premium price and therefore, as a seller, you must be much more efficient and that is hard.