Word.

This has nothing to do with Peru.

But I just read a great Economist article called "Infeasible or Unfeasible?" and it lead me to a great TED Talks video. The article was a response to an email from a reader who wanted to know which was correct: infeasible or unfeasible. The reader's office had recently gone to war with itself over which one was right and better to use.

The Economist answers by doing some research and finding that although many dictionaries list infeasible as "now rare," the use of infeasible has soared over unfeasible since the 70's. Interesting yeah? Well it's probably only me that finds this interesting.

This is the Economist's opinion on the issue:

Having researched this, I now can't figure out what I would say myself. And I must be a pretty can-do fellow, since I have used neither "unfeasible" nor "infeasible" in the many thousands of e-mails stored in both my work and personal accounts. Having done the digging, I would now simply say that "infeasible" has more intellectual defenders and is more common today. It has a cousin in the French infaisable. ("Un-" is a Germanic prefix.) If you must use one or the other, "infeasible" seems the better choice.

Here's the TED video before I get to what I really thought was cool:

Just a little way into the video the speaker talks about a butt-ham problem in relation to people who get all caught up with a word not being in the dictionary. Her take is that just because a word isn't in the dictionary doesn't mean it isn't a word. The butt-ham problem is when you're cutting the perfectly good butt off of a ham at Thanksgiving and the only reason you're doing it is because your family's always done that. So then you go on a hunt for the reason: your mom doesn't know, your grandma doesn't know, but... your great grandma does. And her reason was just because her pan was too small.

So to tie that back to words: don't throw out a word just because the dictionary isn't big enough. The word isn't the problem, the dictionary is. Also though, we can't be reminded often enough to always know the reason's for why we do things. Ask questions. Maybe the problem isn't the ham, it's just the pan. Not the word, the dictionary.

I really enjoyed this TED video and I also really enjoyed the Economist article that lead me to it. So I'll end with another observation that the Economist made.

Finally, to the next meta-question, why do we get so worked up about these tiny things?  People are tribal, and they often enjoy getting especially tribal about the tiniest things. Britons and Americans can both make passionate defences of driving on their respective sides of the road, or how many syllables "alumin(i)um" has, partly because, though the choice is arbitrary, it is defining: do you belong to the red team or the blue team? It seems to be in our nature to get worked up about these things.