Have you noticed a recent proliferation of clever verbal formulations created using the suffix “-ification”?
If yes, you’re not alone. In a recent New Yorker article titled “The -ification of Everything,” journalist Lauren Michele Jackson offers an impressive list of neologistic nominalizations — that is, nouns formed from other parts of speech — including:
the “flu-ification of covid policy” (in The Atlantic);
the “merch-ification of book publishing” (in Esquire);
the “Gen Z-ification” of Harry and Meghan (in the Daily Beast);
the “hoax-ification” of the Trumpian right (in the Washington Post);
the “‘You’re doing it wrong’-ification” of TikTok influencers (in Vox);
the “woke-ification” of various U.S. institutions (by Florida politician Ron DeSantis);
“le Big Mac-ification” of French life (in The New Yorker — a phrase that sounds best when pronounced with a bad fake French accent in the manner of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau).
Quoting the obscure New Zealand scholar who first described nominalizations as zombie nouns, Jackson notes:
Where many other zombie nouns sound stuffy (contextualization, systematization), the “-ification” creations are cheeky about their unwieldiness. As Sword put it, “They’re trying to get your attention.”
Jackson’s article certainly got my attention. It also got me wondering: Why do we “-ify” some nouns and “-icize” others? For example, why did it feel right for me to title this newsletter post Zombification rather than, say, Zombicization or Zombization (or, for that matter, Zombie-ification)?
Linguists may well have an easy answer to the -ify versus -icize question. If they do, I hope they’ll leave an explanation in the Comments section below. (Yes, I’m looking at you, @lynneguist!)
In the meantime, I decided to have some fun playing around in the sandpit of my paywalled garden with if(f)y verbs such as liquefy, petrify, Disneyfy (which means something quite different from Disneyize, apparently), and muntify (no, you won’t find that one in any dictionary).
Despite the frantic promptings of my Commonwealthified spellcheck, I’ve opted for the American spelling -ize/ization rather than the British -ise/isation, for the purely aesthetic reason that the z in nominalization resonates so beautifully with the z in zombie noun.
Enjoy!
Liquefy
Spend a few minutes contemplating the verb forms of the noun liquid, and you may find your brain starting to liquefy.
But wait, what just happened there? Why is it spelled liquefy, not liquify?
To make matters more confusing, there’s also the verb liquidize (roughly synonymous with liquefy, but often associated with a food processing machine called a liquidizer) and liquidate (which means to sell off all the assets of a failing business or, colloquially, to murder someone).
Things get even weirder when you start conjugating. For example, the past participle of liquefy — “to make or become liquid” — is liquified with an i, whereas liquefied with an e means something subtly different, at least according to the experts on Google.
So what happens when we transform these liquid verbs into lumbering zombie nouns? Confusingly, neither liquification nor liquidization — the logical candidates for abstract nouns created from liquefy and liquidize, respectively — can be found in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. The nominalized form of these two verbs turns out to be liquefaction, a word you may well be unfamiliar with unless you work as a materials scientist or live near an earthquake zone, where it refers to a potentially catastrophic phenomenon whereby a solid substance (such as the ground beneath your house) temporarily behaves like a liquid.
Are you feeling mystified, perhaps even stupefied, by the oddities of the English language? Keep reading!
Petrify
Let’s move from liquids to solids. The English word that signifies “to turn into stone” — whether literally, like an ancient forest that has been mineralized over time, or figuratively, like a person too frightened to move — has a Greek noun (pétros) rather than a familiar English object as its root. Meanwhile, the equivalent English nouns (stone or rock) don’t generate verb-ified equivalents: Medusa didn’t stonify or rockify her victims, she petrified them. (She could also have stoned or rocked them; but those would have been quite different gestures).
Having already navigated the confusing transition of liquid (noun) to liquefy (verb) to liquefaction (noun), it’s a relief to note that the zombie noun associated with petrify is petrification, not petrifaction. But here’s a final paradox to ponder: in the computer game World of Warcraft, players can protect themselves from harm by imbibing a Potion of Petrification, which renders them temporarily safe from physical attacks and spells — but also unable to move or perform any action.
In the World of Words, a noun can give birth to a verb that in turn gets swallowed by a noun.
And in World of Warcraft, a liquid can turn you to stone.
Disneyfy
Nominalizations of the proper noun Disney — typically used to signify not just an individual person, Walt Disney, or a corporation, the Walt Disney Company, but the entire entertainment industry that Disney founded — date back at least to 1999, when Alan Bryman published an article in the Sociological Review called “The Disneyization of Society.”
Five years later, organizational scholar Philip Hancock published a review of Bryman’s 2004 book of the same title. In his review, “Disneyfying Disneyization,” Hancock scathingly writes:
[N]ot only is this an immensely bland book about a very colourful topic, it manages at the same time to take on a curiously Disneyfied quality of its own – note I said Disneyfied not Disneyized. Bryman is himself at pains to mark a clear distinction between the idea of Disneyfication and his own Disneyization thesis. For while his own concern is with describing a globally pervasive process of institutional isomorphism, Disneyfication he argues is a far more radical and, one gets the feeling that in the author’s eyes less systematic, body of cultural criticism.
Did you follow the logic there? Apparently Bryman, in his book on Disneyization, critiques the concept of Disneyfication, which is what Hancock in turn accuses him of. Or something like that?
When it comes to warring zombies, the World of Warcraft has nothing on the Wonderful World of Disney!
Muntify
As I’ve already noted, you won’t find the word muntify in any dictionary. It’s formed from the past participle munted, which, in New Zealand and Australian slang, means “broken beyond repair” (or “badly intoxicated,” depending on context) — as in, “I dropped my phone, and now it’s munted.”
Normally, the suffix -fy turns nouns into verbs: liquefy, petrify, Disneyfy. But my kids, when they were young, threw logic and grammar out the window and transformed the implied verb munt (which doesn’t exist) into a longer, fiercer verb, muntify — as in, “We muntified the other rugby team.”
From there, it was just one easy step to muntification, with its delicious echo of mummification — as in, “The muntification of our opponents is now complete.”
Which brings me back to my earlier question: Why has “the -ification of everything” become a cultural trope worthy of a New Yorker article, whereas “the -ization of everything” has not?
Lauren Michele Jackson notes in her article that the suffix -ification “rarely announces good news”:
Nobody wants “app-ification,” “Uber-ification,” “Airbnb-ification,” “Marvel-fication,” or “Walmart-ization,” except, perhaps, shareholders. All of these nominalizations, rather, seem to point to interrelated worries about the monopolizing, homogenizing pattern in which our culture is moving.
So here’s my theory: I think there’s something more potent, more defiant, in that extra syllable (if-i-ca) — that fricative f, that hard c — than in the gentle glide of iza. When we subject an object, person, or concept to -ification, we really feel as though we’ve done something to it, changed its state somehow.
Those same fierce f and c sounds can be heard in the punning portmanteau zombie noun Californication, which brings in a clever twist of humor to soften the aggression. California-fication just doesn’t have the same ring — or staying power.
In other words: it’s all in the poetry!
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