A NEW LINGOVATION! - SYNTASTROPHY

Dear Friends:

Several months back, I shocked the world (or perhaps ten or eleven individuals, one of whom was an elderly female English instructor, who had a horrible fit and began salivating [from what I am told] like a "mad dog"), by introducing the term LINGOVATION. A lingovation is a word which is invented to effect better communication. Some others have included: The OMNIGADGET, EXPONENTIALITY and PDDS (Perceived Data Deficiency Syndrome), to name a few.

Now, I am searching for a special lingovation. I understand that when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, people refer to this as "synergy." I also understand that when a sufficient amount of fissionable radioactive material is clustered together, it is said to reach critical mass. When too many people work too closely and trip over eachother's toes, my old Economics professor would refer to that as the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Microsoft is ignominious for its poor quality controls, its nasty habit of beta-testing at the expense of all of its users, its bullying of many smaller, more innovative companies, and its lack of responsiveness to consumer issues and needs. Examples: Vista, Windows 8, and numerous others.

Yahoo! is infamous for its downtime, its overburdened servers, and its constant reformatting. Examples: e-mails that take 30 minutes to arrive in their recipients' inboxes, the new "Homepage Design," and numerous others.

When one combines Microsoft with Yahoo!, one gets something metaphorically akin to the inverse or opposite of synergy, but something which is  far more exponentially disruptive than The Law of Diminishing Returns, and something which is not a true and literal opposite. The opposite of synergy might be antergy, where the sale of the component parts produces greater value than the sale of the whole (this effect is, in fact, known to exist in the automobile industry). My thesaurus does not offer me anything of use...even my trusted thesaurus is flummoxed on this one. I will probably have to call the veterinarian.

Using an analogy, I first figured it thusly:

Synergy is to critical mass, as _________?__________ is to combining compost heaps.

And, now...back to the LINGOVATION:

I would propose that we refer to this "inverse of synergy," [being defined as a circumstance where the combination of the parts produces a result which is many times worse than the any one of the parts, taken alone could have produced],  as SYNTASTROPHY.

Please let me know if you like this word.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle