“Un-Amazonable” – A New, Instantly Understood, and Easy-to-use Word that has Just Entered Our Lexicon and is Evocative!

It was only a few weeks ago when I came across the word “un-Amazonable” in the media for the first time. Not only did the term make instant sense and catch my attention, it also made me wonder “Why didn’t I think of this simple and evocative word which lends itself to ready application (such as when talking about marketing strategy and tactics for a retailer of consumer products)?”

[To elaborate, it was a reporter on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” who used this word while discussing a highly successful bricks-and-mortar retailer of beauty products. And the reporter’s point in using unamazonable? That the sum total of those beauty products’ intrinsic characteristics plus the services and customer buying experience at the physical stores have made that retail chain’s market share immune to erosion or threats from Amazon.com and other online entities.]

And thus was born an all-new category of future blog posts, one that will feature words that are “new” (at least new to me) but not of such high caliber and multiple senses as to merit inclusion in my regular editions of “Words of the Month,” wherein I design at least half-a-dozen examples for each profiled word. Specifically, words featured under this new label (i.e., “new word just entering our lexicon”) will have to satisfy one or more of the following criteria: 

1. Newly entering our lexicon.
2. Easily understandable.
3. Lends itself to even informal conversations, such as those around the office Keurig machine.
4. Helps make one’s point indelible, succinct, etc. because of, say, the images it conjures up.
5. If not outright new, it is “re-entering” conversational English, i.e., some event or occurrence has made it freshly “airborne,” as happened to the word braggadocio after Carly Fiorina used it in a Republican debate last year. [See main example at http://www.verbalenergy.com/to_print/2016_05-06/braggadocio.html] 

 

An exhortation to you, the reader: Because unamazonable is so easy to use and its sense so obvious and compelling, I expect it to become a fairly common or quotidian term within just a year or two. So, start employing it right away, before it becomes a cliché.  

© Copyright 2016  V. J. Singal