Vocabulate – Nonsense Jargon of the World

Attention video game reviewers, journalists, bloggers and enthusiasts, this is a public service announcement.

While impatiently waiting for a tube heading towards the Eidos shindig last month, I spotted an advert for some generic quasi-erotica romance novel, adorned with a photo of a topless bloke. What caught my eye (not the shirtless hunk, honest) was the word “unputdownable” in the tagline.

Somehow, this monstrous hodgepodge of wordlets has made its way into the general vernacular of avid readers, regardless of how ugly and unwieldy it looks written in gigantic typeface. It’s a wiggle word with the vaguest of meaning and the notion that a book was so engaging, or the cover was so sticky, that you couldn’t un-grip your fingers from its pages. It’s a novel reviewer’s equivalent of “compelling gameplay”.

So it’s with this shocking look into the world of those dreaded “other mediums”, that I will no longer feel guilty when Microsoft Word gives me that evil red underline for mashing together vastly more important words like replayability, platformer and respawn. And neither should you.