Word of the day

If you are a fan of Roddy Doyle - and who isn't? - then you will enjoy his column on Dublin in The Daily Beast, or Newsweek as it is also called. "Dublin city is the sound of people who love words, who love taking words and playing with them, twisting and bending them, making short ones longer and the long ones shorter, people who love inventing words and giving fresh meaning to old ones." 

His word is "what's the story?" - a common Dublin greeting. He introduces us to the house hatcher "a boy or girl - more often a boy - who stays at home all day, won't come out, because he's 'too into the Xbox' . . ." And he tells us about the many ways of using the word buzz.

Word of the day

Today's word is batpack. This is of course a near-homonym, and in normal Australian speech we often pronounce consonants indistinctly, so that many words sound the same. The next time you refer to a backpack in normal speech, say batpack. See if anyone notices.

Of course, in this world of rapidly-growing vocabulary choice, batpack is a word in its own right, too. BATPACK Pty Ltd recharges battery packs, of course. "Rip Curl's Bat Pack Pants are warm, snugly, and super comfy." And in baseball, the bat pack is, naturally, a pack for holding baseball bats.

Next word: digitalise.

Word of the day

Today's word is feedforward. I have always had mixed feelings about the word feedback, but it is too hard to dispense with it. I used the word feedforward yesterday, and had a strong feeling that I had invented it.

Unfortunately, not true. Google claims to have retrieved 938,000 instances. Feedforward, invented by Marshall Goldsmith in an article on management, already has the trappings of a used word - domain names, Wikipedia entries, and so on. Wikipedia describes the word as meaning "giving a pre-feedback to a person or an organization from which you are expecting a feedback. It usually involves giving a document for review and giving an ex post [after the event] information on that document which you have not already given." And feedback itself is defined as "information about actions returned to the source of the actions."

This is not one of Wikipedia's best definitions. It is curious that two spellings of the word are allowed - FeedForward and Feed-forrward - but not the much simpler runtogether, feedforward. And it is curious that both feedback and informaton are used in a singular form - a feedback, an information.

What does the term actually mean? This is what Goldsmith says: "Instead of rehashing a past that cannot be changed - feedback . . . [we] . . . coined "feedforward" to encourage spending time creating a future." You can watch Marshall explain it all on Youtube. Or you can follow up on the other meanings which have been attributed to feedforward through a Google search, or watch the Dutch progressive rock / melodic metal band, FeedForward.