I reluctantly accept FUNCTIONALITY.

Larry Hendrick certainly wasn't the first to write about it, but he articulated what I thought about the language of technology; that it often takes a good word rich with meaning and destroy it with the three little letters, i t y.

FUNCTION is one of those words and as long as I've been a friend of that word, I've known a couple of extensions to that word such as functional or functions. But when I first heard the word functionality, I stopped breathing for a few minutes while my mind tried to reconcile the term.

What does functionality mean?

Looking at other ity words such as personality, brutality, generosity and respectability, I tried to determine how that prefix modifies the word. In the case of personality, the ity denotes the characteristic of being a person. In the case of brutality, the characteristic of being a brute or the act of being brutal. With generosity, its the characteristic or the act of being generous. And so on.

Functionality therefore must mean the characteristic of being functional.

Therein lies my problem. The word functional already describes a characteristic, that of having a function, or being able to function. A functional car is one that works. It can operate. What is the functionality of a car?

Quite often when you hear the term functionality spoken by people in the technology industry, they're mostly referring to a feature. For example, the ability of the software to save a document to the file system. This is a feature. When it works, its functional. When it doesn't its defective. But you will often hear the words the save functionality's not working. Larry Hendrick gave another software example, that of the search functionality. This is actually the search feature, or the search function. It's functional or defective.

We often refer to defective software.

I must admit, my command of the English language isn't native even though I've been speaking it all my life and there are time when I have to say things in my head three or four times before I think that they sound right, but this is one of those times when I can't get around the word. It feels wrong. Exaggerated, as thought its trying to sound more important than it really is. Reminds me of a skit by George Carlin where he's making fun of the prefix "pre." I can see the point of adding pre- to some words, but George was talking about its overuse. It's used way too much and for the most part, used to add a level of importance to the subject.

But my war with functionality is over. I won't stress over it any longer. I just won't use it, and nobody can make me use it. I'll sit quietly in meetings while that word is being bantered around and when it's my turn to speak, I'll use the words that I'm comfortable with.

This article forms the last time I write that dastardly word!