New words appear in our language almost every day. Sometimes, like a lovely wildflower or sturdy oak, they are welcome additions to the lexical landscape, delighting the rambler who encounters them for the first time. Some of these neologisms, however, produce an effect more like rounding a bend in the trail only to find a ruptured bag of garbage, or severed human foot. In a depressing item in today’s news, I have encountered just such a word: “weisure”.
This ghastly coinage describes a grim reality of modern life: the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure. The article’s author seems to see this as a sign of progress; I certainly do not. We read:
What happened? Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there’s more work and less play, according to Conley’s book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”
“For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you’re going to have an extremely long workweek,” he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.
Ah, business and pleasure, simultaneously. What a blessing!
Indeed, why stop there? Readers are advised to be on the lookout for “wex”, “wefecation”, “wisease”, “wemotherapy”, and, if the wemotherapy doesn’t work out, perhaps even a stay in a “wospice”.
4 Comments
Makes you want to womit.
I’ve never seen that word before. Fascinating and repellent at the same time.
Kevin
Strikes me as drunken writing… or should I say “dwunk’n w’itin’?
I assure you I was quite sober, Bob. I take my responsibilities very seriously.