Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
One of the nice things about English, though, is that you can add endings to practically any word, and the listener will understand the word even if nobody's ever used it before. The "-er" ending in this case meaning "a person who carries out the action". Eg the word "computer" is recorded from 1640 in the sense of "a person who performs calculations".
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Yes, that makes if practical, but rather detracts from any cleverness that might have been attributed for coining the word. Plus, generally accepted derivations eventually make it into the dictionary as such, which does not appear to have happened for ablutioner. Whatever. I still like abluvion, which I don't think I'd come across before, and it's a word I could imagine using.