News & Opinion - March 2012
Here you will find all our latest news, views and events.
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Thu 15th Mar 12 MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
How many more variations on the word 'vacation' are we going to be subjected to?
I have just received an e-mail from a company that used the derivative 'bizcation' to describe overnight business trips and to suggest that they were now being treated as a mini-break. Why not just use the phrase 'business trip' because it is an accurate summary of the activity. A business trip is certainly no holiday, unless you're free to drink yourself silly from a free minibar!
Does it matter what words we create if it they accurately describe something better than the existing words or phrases? Take 'marketing', there is no Latin word for this activity, so it is right that a new word was used to describe this activity. I am no pedant when it comes to the English language (I will start a sentence with 'and' or 'but' if necesssary), but the new words based on 'vacation' are words that I won't be adopting. These are: 'staycation', which means a holiday taken in your own country (whenever did the word 'holiday' only ever mean going abroad?); there is 'daycation', which (you guessed it) means a day out (presumably in your own country, unless you live in Kent) and, of course, we now have 'bizcation'.
The etymology, or roots, of the word 'vacation' can be traced right back to its Latin origins (who said Latin is a dead language?). The word oroginally meant: 'freedom from obligations, leisure, release" (presumably being released from some activity or occupation). The Latin word 'vacationem' (from vacatio), which referred to 'leisure, a being free from duty,' became 'vacation' and by the 15th century the word was being associated with freedom and leisure, and from the late-19th century the word had become properly adopted to mean holiday, although in the USA it is still 'vacation', which is a much more accurate word than our word 'holiday', which is derived from 'holy days'.
Just as the 'gate' from the Watergate Scandal has been added to anything to do with scandalous events or behaviour, we're now using 'cation' as though that part of the word itself means 'holiday' and then adding anything in front.
English is a rich and diverse language that is constantly evolving, but just as with the evolution of plants and animals not everything survives. Natural selection takes care of what survives and what dies in the plant and animal kingdom. Let's hope that these phonetically ugly and useless mutations soon go the way of the dinosaurs.