Anticonfiguratoriabilitizationism

Yesterday on Twitter I followed the link in this tweet:

I don’t use Facebook, so I’m not 100% sure what the like button does other than add some sort of counter to a page (which in th case of this page did indeed say that 38,327 people liked it), but what caught my eye was the sentence

To get started, just use the configurator below to get code to add to your site.

Is configurator a word? Well it’s clearly being used, so I suppose by definition it must be, regardless of whether it should be . . . though by rights it should be derived from the verb configurate, whatever that is. Otherwise it would surely just be a configurer.

But most words don’t just exist all on their own: they belong to families. And small differences like configure/configurate usually carry some distinction of meaning. All of which got me thinking about what family configurator might belong to.

I therefore offer you

configurate

to subject something to the actions of a configurator.

configurator

a program designed to screw up your settings automatically rather than manually, so you’ve no hope of putting them right again.

configurability

the extent to which something may be configured.

configuratoriability

the extent to which something may be configurated with a configurator.

configuratoriabilitization

the process of adding configuratoriability to something.

anticonfiguratoriabilitizationism

the position adopted by an anticonfiguratoriabilitizationist, who (i) prefers to make settings manually where possible, and (ii) deplores the proliferation of configurators and of programs which, when installed, misconfigurate everything in sight. (And, it should be added, out of sight—which can be much worse.)

I’m an anticonfiguratoriabilitizationist.