Birth of a word: systemness?

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo with
text added by author.

I was all set to rail against abuse of language in this blog post (and I may still, depending on where my rambling thoughts take me as I compose; writing is thinking, after all). Recently I received an email at work containing this bullet point: “Aligning our strategies to a point of coherent systemness.” And I thought, systemness? What the %!&$ is that?!? Houston, we have achieved incoherence! Then my wife told me that “systemness” is a term she hears often in the health-care management field. So I googled systemness (there are two words that didn’t exist 20 years ago) and sure enough wikipedia (another recently-coined word) defined it as a neologism that means “the state, quality, or condition of a complex system, that is, of a set of interconnected elements that behave as, or appear to be, a whole, exhibiting behavior distinct from the behavior of the parts.” Well, butter my biscuit, who knew?

New words have continually been invented throughout the history of the English language. In fact, Shakespeare was one of the most prolific and playful coiners of new words of all time. That is not to say that “systemness” is worthy of Shakespeare, or even worthy of a dictionary entry at the moment. At best, it is management-speak jargon. If it manages to gather enough cachet in our culture, perhaps “systemness” will one day merit a dictionary listing. Again, that is not to say that each word in the dictionary is an equally worthy word. I once read this word in a piece of writing: “originization.” This will always be a horrid word, even if it were to snake its way into the lexicon. Basically, this writer was trying to think of the noun form of the verb “originate” but proceeded to lengthen the word instead of bothering to think of the perfectly good (and shorter) noun form that already exists: origin. I’m still not sure about “systemness.” My gut instinct is to despise it. But only time will tell the fate of this so-called word.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.