"Idealic New England Village". What’s in a word?

Not that I’m in the market for a Lakeside Chateau in New Canaan, Connecticut  not one that’s appraised at $9.5 million, at any rate.

But every once in a while - out of boredom, curiosity, or procrastination (never lust) - I do glance through ads for pricey real estate, and one that I glanced through recently was in last week’s Sunday NY Times Magazine.

I’ve no doubt that this 32 room house on a private lake is “exceptional”, the “masterpiece” it’s described as.

But its location is in an “idealic New England village.”

What, pray tell, is that?

Is it an ideal New England village? A New England village known for its ideals? Or is it, perhaps, an idyllic New England village?

Inquiring minds want to know, even if those inquiring minds don’t come with a pocketbook that can match the property which, I do want to let you know, has never been lived in. (One hour from NY? Maybe it was built for one of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.)

Maybe the use of the non-word idealic is the case of someone thinking one thing and writing another. (I’ve been known two think won word and right its homonym.) Maybe its an attempt at a coinage - a neologism of ideal and idyllic. Maybe it was dictated to someone who’s just unfamiliar with the word, lacked a dictionary, and was unaware that you can go to The Google and look a word up.

The point?

If the point of marketing is to communicate, what we have here - and wherever we use words that confound our prospects - is failure to communicate.

I’ve been thinking of this lately because I just completed a case study for a client that includes several uses of a word that, while not quite in the real-fake-word category of idealic, is a word that’s hovering somewhere between techie argot and generally accepted, standard usage. Most of the uses I’ve come across are tech-speak, with an occasional market-speak instance.

I don’t want to give away the word here - maybe someday - but it’s pretty clear what the word means, particularly given the context in which it’s used. (Kind of like idealic in the ad…) Yet there’s a perfectly acceptable word that could be used in its stead.

So why use the new word?

In this case, the customer profiled in the case study uses it in their literature (including on their web site) to describe their application.  But I wouldn’t have taken and used it if the customer being quoted in the profile hadn’t used it to describe our application, as well.

In this context, it seemed to work very well and make sense.

To get around our unease (i.e., my own unease and that of my client’s VP of marketing), we’re putting “the word” in quotes, and - when we use it in the first instance, we’re defining it. Thus, we’re acknowledging that not everyone will be familiar with it, and that we recognize that it’s a bit of an oddball - and we’re also making the point that our customer here is using the same high praise for our application that they do for their own.

I suppose I could have pushed back on the customer quote a bit, but that would have been, frankly, less than ideal. (Or do I mean idealic here?)

In any case, I think that as marketers we’re better off avoiding the use of non-words, or words-in-the-making, wherever possible. But in the case of our customer case study, I’m going to give us a pass this time.

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