Writing Impediment

People who make up horrible stupid words, either from ignorance or simply not giving a damn, drive me up the wall. I am speaking as one of the internet's foremost experts on whether or not "incentivize" is a word.*

At work today, someone in HR (no!) sent out an agency-wide email to recruit employees for a program that pairs volunteers with the children of parents who are doing time in prison.

If some of the state employees I've seen constitute an improvement, we're not talking petty larceny here, either.

There's going to be a seminar explaining how much of a positive impact you can have, and telling you how to become a mentor, and how mentors are matched with mentees, which at first glance I read as "manatees," because "mentees" is not a word, people!

It's probably inevitable, seeing as how there is now an accepted word "orate," which is a back-formation of "orator." The -or ending is not a causative suffix. An orator is not a person who orates; and a mentor most certainly is not someone who ments. An advisor is someone who advises, but that's only because it was originally a misspelling of "adviser."

That's your language lesson for the day. Now go do something nice for a walrus.

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*No