words that are[n't] words

I encountered an old frenemy today: the squiggly red line in Word, telling me that the jumble of letters I just typed has no real meaning. I had quite a few run-ins with the red squiggle in undergrad too. Please note, this is not because I'm a bad speller. I'm a pretty good speller (although, admittedly, I'm getting worse with age and more consistent use of auto-correct). The squiggled lines are underneath words that I sorta kinda made up -- but really, they make sense! And most of the time, professors don't notice (except once...I got an essay back with a word circled and a comment: "This is not a word.")

My favorite word that I made up in undergrad was "childization." I needed this word, though -- I was describing a woman (in a novel) who was being treated like a 5 year old by her husband. The closest word to it is "infantilization," but it felt inaccurate -- he wasn't treating her like an infant. I know that infantilization actually means to treat someone like a child, but it doesn't sound like that's what it means, so it felt wrong.

In the paper I just wrote, I had four red squigglies:

1. Rhetorics: Um, duh, this one is totally a word. It was even in the title of one of the articles I read recently. Suck it, Spellcheck.

2. Rhetors: Pretty self-explanatory: people who do rhetoric. Maybe this one shouldn't be a word, if only because I'm kinda sick of talking about rhetoric.

3. Memorialize: Brian correctly defined this one immediately, so that means it counts as a real word in my book.

4. Problematize: This is every grad student's favorite word: to create a problem or view something as a problem. On every grad student's diploma, you could replace their degree title with "Problematization" and they probably wouldn't mind.