Image: Getty Images for WIRED25
By Johnny LieuIn case you missed it, Jeff Bezos called the National Enquirer’s bluff by posting their attempts to blackmail him on the internet.
Published on Thursday, the Amazon CEO’s Medium post contained plenty of lurid detail about the intimate photos the newspaper was threatening to release if he did not comply with their demands.
SEE ALSO: And the Jeff Bezos dick pic commentary has begun
Amid the revelations was Bezos’ admission that his ownership of the Washington Post had posed some problems for him, or as he put it in his post (emphasis ours):
“My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.”
Call us nitpickers, but “complexifier” doesn’t appear to be a word in the English language, but it sure got the attention of people online.
I like that he used the word “complexifier,” bc it means that he definitely wrote it himself and is an actual person who would get into a petty argument with a copy editor.
— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) February 7, 2019
so far I’ve gotten far enough into the Bezos post to see him invent the word “complexifier”
— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) February 7, 2019
the unvanny valley-ness of “complexifier” really makes me think “I love you, alive girl” was not an autocorrect/typo
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) February 7, 2019
I know it’s not the main thing, but is ‘complexifier’ in common usage now?
— emily bell (@emilybell) February 8, 2019
Gonna be using the word “complexifier” every day from here on out. The word “complexifier” is a real complexifier for me.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) February 8, 2019
Dibs on The Complexifier, a Jason Statham action thriller about a billionaire who goes rogue to destroy an evil tabloid who violated the rules of Journalism
— kang
(@jaycaspiankang) February 7, 2019
“Complexifier,” however, does appear to exist in French.
Predictably, the definition of the word according to French dictionary Larousse is to “make something more complex, more complicated.” A direct translation in English would be “complicating.”
According to Google Books, the word has been in English books since 1953, although its frequency is a fraction of a percent.
You could say the word is quite the, ahem, complexifier.
from Daily Trends Hunter http://bit.ly/2UHMylc
via IFTTT
Daily Trends Hunter 