Vendrification

It is sad fact that the novelty of a phenomenon, object or concept that is the very impetus for the coinage of a new word to describe it (something which ought now and then to be a happy occasion in the life of a language, counterbalancing the melancholy fate of words and phrases disdained by the freshest generations) proves seldom to be a guarantor of the quality of neologism. While some linguists object to the etymological miscegenation of the coming together of, for example, greek and latin roots such as in the most notorious example of such a coinage, Sociology, others object to morphemes broken in half and thrown together as prefixes and suffixes much in the way amateur chefs might break dried spaghetti into a pan. The suffix -aholic and its varients cause much consternation. Other coinages seem to err rather in terms of logic. Vendrification is one such example. Based, it seems, upon gentrification, vendrification describes the change in tone of an area with the influx of upmarket food vans and mobile units which may or may not have a fixed ‘pitch’ but which nonetheless have a deleterious effect on the more traditional vendors operating in the area. The objections to this coinage is that whilst the word gentry may with logical consistency be turned into a verb to indicate the change in tone of an area so that it comes to have more in common with the gentry, an area which already has traditional vendors cannot come to have more in common with the word vendor by the displacement of them by more vendors.

[This article is a flub. It appears to be the work of a callow undergraduate attempting wit or erudition beyond his/her grasp. Do you have information on/quotes illustrating uses of VENDRIFICATION? Send them to prof.gavin.belcher@googlemail.com.]