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Complex Numbers #1082037 added January 6, 2025 at 12:31pm
Restrictions: None
Business or Pleasure?
I haven't had a good rant in a while. Business Insider has provided the inspiration for an attempt at one.
These idiotic, contrived portmanteaux are getting way out of hand.
When 25-year-old Josh Nichols had a short work trip to Hamburg, Germany, he and a coworker decided to add a couple extra days to stop by Belgium and France, two places he'd never been.
Well, that bit, at least, I can relate to.
The combination of business and leisure travel has become so popular that it has a name: bleisure travel...
Stop.
... also referred to as blended travel.
I get the urge to replace a phrase with a single word, but something about the one they chose is like sandpaper on my brain.
A survey published by the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 2023 found nearly half of business travelers said they'd extended a work trip in the previous year, and 84% said they were interested in bleisure.
Stop.
Hilton's 2025 Travel Trends Report said nearly 30% of global travelers now take trips with "frolleagues" — colleagues who are also friends.
By all that's good and pure in the world, please fucking stop.
Bleisure can take several forms...
Holy shit, stop.
...but it often occurs when an employee is already on a business trip.
Business trips weren't really part of my employment, so I don't have any personal experience with it. Just to be clear, I've got nothing against the concept. Just not that word.
Many bleisure travelers extend their trips...
I'm pleading. I'm begging. Stop!
"Anything that lets me try something new when I would otherwise just kind of sit in my hotel and wait for the next day of meetings to come is something I'd consider bleisure," Nichols said.
Give me something I can punch. Now.
AllFly... has adapted the way it books trips in response to the growing demand for bleisure.
How about responding to the growing demand for not using that gods-be-damned word?
The article devolves into an ad for AllFly, then:
Totten said the demand for bleisure has consistently grown...
Remember how my "resolution" was to drink every day in January? It's tougher than I thought it would be, but I've managed so far. Articles like this one are great motivators for me to stick to my decision. And maybe even double or triple down on it. Yes, I'm well aware that "tripling down" isn't a thing, but if they get to make up words, I get to make up my own blackjack metaphors.
Nichols, who travels frequently for work, said bleisure is a great way to get the most out of his business travel...
Hulk SMASH.
He still uses all of his vacation days and views bleisure as a "supplement."
How about supplementing my fist?
Look. I don't expect much from BI. I could have passed this article right on by, ignoring it like most of their crappy SEO-tactics stealth advertisements (I wanted to add "AI-generated," but I have no proof of that, and I don't think LLMs could piss me off as badly as this article did). I didn't, and that's on me.
But if you want to have some fun, pretend for a moment, if you're from the US, that you're not from the US, but some other Anglophone country. UK, e.g. As we all know, some words are spelled differently on either side of the Atlantic, like tire and tyre. Other words, because English is just such a fun language, are spelled the same but pronounced differently. We pronounce leisure as something like "lees-yure." That's not wrong; it's just the American pronunciation. Brits pronounce it more like "leh-zure." For them, it rhymes with "pleasure," which I say is rather appropriate.
But if you're going to make a portmanteau like the one in the article/ad, and pronounce it in the British style, well, the initial "b" could be easily confused with "p," making it sound entirely like "pleasure."
So not only is it very possibly the worst portmanteau in the history of portmanteaux (hell, even "pleasness" would have been slightly less annoying), but it's potentially a confusing one.
Just. Stop. |
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