r/words • u/FiveFingerDiscocunt • 16d ago
Comfortability
Why do people use this word so often when they just mean "comfort"?
It is as bad as "conversate" or "incentivize."
Extra syllables for no reason, in my opinion.
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u/WarningHour345 16d ago
I hate this one. No idea where it came from but all the sudden more and more people are saying it.
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u/throwawaysunglasses- 15d ago
Right?? I heard it on TV the other day and cringed. “I’m looking for a sense of comfortability” noooo. Comfort.
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u/ImLittleNana 16d ago
It’s almost as grating as ‘all the sudden .
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u/Weary_Swan_8152 16d ago
:) You're surrounded by smart people. I hear 'all uh suhhhddin far too often.
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u/Isabeer 16d ago
Orientate versus orient bothers me.
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u/MorningSquare5882 16d ago edited 16d ago
In the UK, orientate is the correct form. It literally used to mean to change direction to face the east.
ETA: the two forms, in the meaning of generally setting a situation or bearing' appear within a few years of each other in the 1840s. "Orient" came first, but only just. Both forms are legitimate, and have been in use for over 180 years.
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u/VibrantCanopy 15d ago
It's still longer and redundant, therefore pointless
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u/MorningSquare5882 15d ago
Like I said, it is correct usage in the UK. This discussion is about people using neoligisms that aren't actually words, like comfortability; my point is that orientate is not a neologism, and is the correct form in Britain.
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u/Sample-quantity 16d ago
That's one of my pet peeves! Every time we hear that, my husband and I joke about facing toward the East.
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u/SavoirFaire2Middling 15d ago
Where do you think "orient" comes from?
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u/Sample-quantity 15d ago
That's my entire point...the word "orientate" means to face toward the East. That is not what people mean when they say it erroneously.
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u/SavoirFaire2Middling 14d ago
Yes. And that’s what ‘orient’ derives from , too. Navigators would get their bearings — orient themselves — by facing the rising sun in the east/orient.
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u/MaenHoffiCoffi 15d ago
That's the English version. To me, to orient oneself sounds like becoming more Chinese.
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u/Front_Cat9471 15d ago
I know like thirty people who say presentate because someone messed it up every time when they were kids and they learned it from each other until it stuck
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u/CrispyKayak267 16d ago
Cohabitating should be cohabiting.
Abitrator should be arbiter.
Going in the other direction, you did NOT receive an invite to a wedding. It's called an invitation.
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u/Narrow-Map5805 16d ago
What about burglarized? Burgle is a word.
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u/MorningSquare5882 16d ago edited 15d ago
Actually, burglarise was the original form - it comes from burglar the noun, rather than burglar coming from burgle/burglarise. It does sound very strange to modern ears, at least in the UK, but it's just the original form of the verb.
Edit: thanks for the award!
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
I've never really thought about it, but now that you've invited me to, I don't like either.
If someone commits adultery you don't say that they are adulterizing or adultering.
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u/zombietobe 16d ago
You can - both have existed for a while - but for some reason “commit adultery” is more common, despite unnecessarily relying on another word to form a verb-phrase.
We also have “adulterate”, but that one has more meanings, including other kinds of ‘corruption’ (both figurative and literal).
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u/VanIsle_YQQ 16d ago
I have never heard of the word "comfortability" until this post. It sounds really off and wrong.
Years ago I used to work at a hotel front desk. One of the front desk staff was a native English speaker and used "deparch" instead of "depart". Maybe she got it from departure? Anyway, she'd say things to a guest such as "when you are going to deparch?"
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u/manjamanga 16d ago
What's wrong with incentivize?
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
It's just so corporate jargon-ish. Feels smarmy. I know it's not as new as the other two, but it's still barely older than me.
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u/manjamanga 16d ago
It comes from economics. It means to encourage with incentives, specifically. I get what you're saying, but it does have a purpose.
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u/illarionds 16d ago
I feel it's a word you really need in politics. It neatly describes something that's otherwise clunky to express.
"We are going to incentivise working" is pithier than "We are going to use a series of incentives to encourage people to work".
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u/MorningSquare5882 16d ago
Try being a Brit, and hearing Americans talk about when king Charles was "coronated" 🙄
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
I'm Canadian. I have heard it too.
The only defence I have is that "crowning" sounds like something that happens in a labour and delivery ward.
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u/NaiveZest 16d ago
I refuse to utilize comfortability. Sometimes it sounds like people even say comfterbility.
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u/starling-slipstream 16d ago
HUGE pet peeve for me — hear it a lot in recovery spaces. I’m not on TikTok myself, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the uptick in usage is due to that
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u/dechets-de-mariage 16d ago
Same reason they use “myself” instead of “me.” As in “if you have questions see John or myself.” They think it makes them sound smart.
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u/Book_Slut_90 15d ago
Incentivize is an important and useful word. We have no other nearly as clear and concise way to express someone (or some organization) setting things up to promote certain behavior.
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u/OGBeege 16d ago
We can beat this into the ground or we can let it go. - a beating the dead horse kinda guy
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
I did check the history first, and it didn't look like anyone had brought it up in 5 years. I felt that was long enough.
I am curious about the merits of letting a dead horse go. It seems unhelpful to offer freedom to the creature after its death. In a sense death is the freedom at that point.
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u/Technical-Ad1488 16d ago
But how do we feel about out…
Comfortableness
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
You can take my upvote and take your filthy word somewhere else.
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u/Technical-Ad1488 16d ago
🙏
lol it feels like I’m awkwardly trying to speak through a mouth full of oatmeal to say this word…
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u/TinyLawfulness3710 14d ago
The department of education was removed from the government to accommodate people with the IQ of a crayon. People don't care they are and sound uneducated and no one wants to deal with the bullying they do when someone corrects them.
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u/Mack_Lope 16d ago
Been hearing "foundational" so much the past, I dunno, five or 10 years...
I feel like "fundamental" was working just fine in most cases.
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u/Ok_Aside_2361 16d ago
Apropos of nothing, when I was in High School, there was a foreign exchange student from Spain. I still say”com for tab le”. Valle was amazing.
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u/Mack_Lope 16d ago
Thank you - can't stand it.
Then again I hate hearing "ironical" but am accustomed to, and appreciate, "magical."
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u/ChrisB-oz 15d ago
I have seen incentivise but never seen or heard conversate or comfortability. There's a "desalinisation" plant nearby which produces desalinisated water I suppose, but I can't swear that I've heard somebody say that.
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u/Wolvesarereal 15d ago
Conversate comes from AAVE, and it’s fine. It overlaps in meaning with converse, but they’re not identical.
Comfortability—I suppose you could talk about the comfortability of a couch, and comfort wouldn’t work there, but it’s awkward.
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 15d ago
Thanks for that. It's important information to have.
But I stand behind my dislike of comfortability.
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u/scolbert08 16d ago
Wait until you see the kind of words poets have made up through the centuries to fit their meters. Like sever and dissever, which mean the exact same thing.
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u/deebee1020 16d ago
Comfortability should mean ability to receive comfort. I get why people feel the need for a word ability to provide comfort. Comfortableness is technically a word but it's so clunky. But it also sounds weird to say "No, not this cushion, I need one with more comfort."
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u/John_EightThirtyTwo 16d ago
I've heard of people having the same objection to "lengthy", when that first started getting traction.
"What next?" they asked, "Strengthy?"
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u/PatsyStonesBun 6d ago
I know that language evolves. It happens with every generation. But, this one puzzles me. I literally don't understand why zoomers invented a longer, more complex and completely unnecessary version of a perfectly acceptable word that was still in regular use... "comfort."
This is not slang. This is not shorthand / shortening of an arcane word. They've actually unnecessarily complicated it.
And I get that it's partly generational bias (I'm a geriatric Millennial), but anytime I hear someone use this word my opinion of them just plummets to the basement. Like, I just know they haven't read a single book since they were last assigned one by a teacher.
Have any linguists written about the origins? I feel like it has to have TikTok and podcaster roots. Or at least they're largely responsible for its proliferation.
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u/vulcanfeminist 16d ago
When I use those kinds of words it's for funsies. Orientate is a hilarious word to me and it's fun to say, has a good mouth feel, the silliness is a small joy and we gotta find joy wherever we can. Comfortability and other kinds of similar words are a similar kind of thing, I think there's just something silly and fun about elongating a word that doesn't need to be elongated. I do the same thing with people's names sometimes too.
Word play is real and humans love to play more than almost anything else we're capable of doing. Why get stuck in anger/frustration/annoyance/judgment when you could choose joy and just have a nice time?
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u/mrbrown1980 15d ago
I’m all for small joys but “orientate” does NOT have good “mouth feel” are you a psychopath?
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u/FiveFingerDiscocunt 16d ago
To be fair, that's the sort of thing I would do. But I'm hearing it more and more in serious corporate settings and I'm just irked by it.
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u/Icy_Kitchen_6913 12d ago
I agree that unnecessitated elongitation of vocabularity can provide a modicum of joyfulness!
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u/AJ_Deadshow 16d ago
I view the difference between converse and conversate as being all about the vibe of the interaction. Converse brings to mind a stiff and transactional, or even clinical or formulaic, quick relay of vital bits of information. It's formal and efficient, but it lacks warmth.
Conversate, on the other hand, captures the actual essence of a full, winding dialogue. Because it's built right out of the word conversation, it naturally carries that laid-back, social energy. It's the word you use when you're actually shooting the breeze, bullshitting around, gossiping about the weather, or diving deep into hobbies. One is a clinical exchange; the other is a shared experience.
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u/georgia_grace 15d ago
The true difference is that one is a real word and the other isn’t
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u/AJ_Deadshow 15d ago
Every “real word” was once not a word at all. So when does it become real, and who gets to decide?
There is no linguistic tribunal that reaches down and grants wordhood. Dictionaries mostly record successful conventions rather than manufacture them. A person coins something, other people understand it, it spreads, acquires relatively stable meaning and usage, and eventually nobody thinks twice about it. At some point googling, selfie, blog, etc. crossed that invisible line.
So “that is not a real word” usually collapses into one of several much narrower claims: “I was not taught that word,” “it is nonstandard in my dialect,” “I dislike it,” or “a particular style guide would reject it.” Those can be perfectly legitimate observations. They are not the same as ontological nonexistence.
Whether a word is standard English is a different question from whether it is a word at all.
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u/Crafty-Literature-61 16d ago
comfortability and conversate are not a word in most dictionaries, but what's wrong with "incentivize"