ZOMBIE NOUNS!

Helen Sword wrote about zombie nouns as an op ed in the New York Times last summer, and I have been thinking about them more and more often as I notice examples cropping up all over the place. The problem with living dead verbiage, or nominalizations, is the pomposity of the presumption to ply readers with an excessiveness of wordiness. Did you get that? Probably not. It's a lot easier and more direct to just say that zombie nouns make sentences unnecessarily wordy and pompous. If you haven't already caught on from my example above, a nominalization is the creation of a noun by fusing a noun ending (like -ism, -ity, or -ness) onto a verb or an adjective. The irony is that the name nominalization is in itself a zombie noun, isn't it?! Here is Ms. Sword's definition: "Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings." Wonderful!

This is your warning to steer clear of the zombies and viva active verbs! Or, if you like the living dead, join the comment conversation below to make a few new blood-sucking zombies...