efficacy

Thursday, April 2, 2009

"Efficacy."

Everyone seems to be using this word; why can't people just say something's "effective"?

Instead you get these labyrinthine sentences whose meaning is lost among the author's struggles to squeeze in strange and terrible phrases like "the efficacy of which is especially efficacious."

I recently read a sentence that went something like

I find mulching's efficacy to be 75%

You could just write, "I find mulching's 75% effective" and be done with it. Even its definition sounds pretentious:

capacity for producing a desired result or effect; effectiveness: a remedy of great efficacy.