In the days since this revelation, I’ve also heard “impactful” and “guiltful” and I expect to hear many more variations. I checked out dictionary.com and found “impactful.” But it’s not officially a word yet; the definition provided is from version 0.9.6 of Webster’s Dictionary. So it’s a beta word I’m dealing with, from a beta version of a dictionary. To whom do I report the fact that the word is buggy?

(It was a teenage girl in my wife’s English class who used “guiltful.” She is Bosnian and has only been speaking English for a few years now; she is excused. There is no excuse for my planful, impactful, voiceful colleagues, however.)

We’re witnessing the birth of another inane and vulgar addition to the business lexicon, dear reader. It’s kind of exciting, in the same way I guess shoplifting is exciting for shoplifters, or a heroin fix is exciting for a junkie. Imagine being present the first time someone “touched base,” or took a discussion “offline,” or assigned an “action item” instead of “talking about what needed to get done.” Soon we’ll be hearing –ful stuck on the end of everything.

And yet I feel a little guilty, too. Do I just stand idly by, while the language is violated by a bunch of thugs in khakis? Should I not speak up, while helpless nouns – proper nouns, from good Latin families – are forced into loveless marriages with hateful, spiteful suffixes, and destined to raise a family of inbred, mutant adjectives? Do I trade my beliefs for being belieful, ambition for being ambitionful, vision for visionful, conviction for convictionful?