Thursday, March 19, 2009

Making Up New Words

I love new words, even when they don't deserve to be standard usage. It's just fun.

Here's one that I *think* is an error in editing, from the beauty copy today.



squoval-shaped nails


I *think* the editor was trying to change "square" to "oval" (or vice versa) and didn't realize that she'd left letters in. But she also pushes the envelope a little (and the best way to push it a little is to push it more, and than dial back), so maybe she MEANT it to be square/oval?

I'll ask her. Meanwhile, I love it. It even SOUNDS fun.


Follow-up: It's an industry term. So I'm going to lobby for this:

"squoval"
nails

to let the quotes do one of their *real* jobs, which is to indicate jargon.



Some background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squoval

2 comments:

JD (The Engine Room) said...

I've heard of squircle before, but not squoval. However squoval is listed in Wikipedia (for the moment):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squoval

I don't think it was an error.

TootsNYC said...

Nope, industry jargon. They don't want to use quotes, so I'm going to look and see what other women's magazines do in their nail stories.