New Year's Resolution #1

I will avoid nominalizations.

Latin may be dead, but it continues to warp our living language. I'm not talking about the 60 percent or so of English words evolved from Latin: words like vulgar, brevity, bonus or civil. I'm talking about the words to which we've tacked on endless strings of prefixes and suffixes to serve our convenience: the bloated, bastardized nominalizations.

...inalization.

All language starts with the physical world, with a word denoting a tangible thing -- a person, a place, a physical quality, an action. The word "margin," for example, made a quick leap from the Old English word "margos," meaning an edge or border. And then the latinization began (dun dun DUN!).

Margin -> Marginal -> Marginalize -> Marginalization

With Latin suffixes at work, we've gone full circle from a noun to a new noun: but with each new Latin suffix, we get a word a little bit uglier, a little more abstract, a little more Vulgar (puns!).

I don't want to institute a universal ban on nominalizations: they can be used safely, if sparingly, and more importantly, judiciously.  When using a nominalization, consider two things:

1. Diction: Is there a simpler, non-nominalization I could be using? What am I even trying to say?
2. Syntax: What is this word doing to the rest of my sentence?  Am I slipping into passive voice or vagueness?  Is this word obstructing my cadence and flow?

And that rounds out our Top 10 New Year's Resolutions.  It's been fun, it's been therapeutic, it's been real. And seriously, guys, we'd love to hear from you. Did your writerly pet peeve not make our list? Let us know. We'll write a post about it just for you. You'll be Internet-famous in 2012.