There is always room for new words in our lives, and I’ve just had to fit in this one, found in a heavily academic text: reify (taking the abstract and considering it to be concrete). It’s potentially a very useful word, especially in academia where the theoretical too easily becomes a little too real much of the time, due to spending too much time thinking about a subject.

Politics and economics are two arenas where you would expect to find “reification” and “reified,” so I jumped on the word and googled it, only to find that a) the first options are all dictionary definitions, which is a sign that you won’t hear this word on the street corner and b) mein gott! there is a certain Germanic something to this word so that my favourite definition comes from wikipedia, which says “thing-ification,” from Marxism in German.

This could well be the best thing Marxism has had to offer the world. “Thingification” could just catch on, even at the street corner. A very useful somethingishness about it, I believe.

Note: GL editor Ellen Wallace is the author of The Fine Line, a guide to communicating clearly in English, published by the International Baccalaureate Organization, where it has remained the best-selling reference work much of the time since 1999. This blog will continue to observe the use of English in an international setting.