Word To Use Today: garbology.

Sometimes a suffix does wonders.

You might have thought that searching through dustbins was an activity confined to vagrants, detectives, thieves, foxes, and tabloid journalists; but call it an -ology, garbology, say, and suddenly you're a scientist, an ecologist, and an economist; and by searching through people's rubbish you're analysing the consumption patterns of households. 

Useful stuff.

It's a big thing, garbology, believe it or not, especially now the effects that waste plastics are having on the world are becoming known.

But surely even the keenest garbologist must wish he could have had a better name. Someone could have come up with a wholly Greek form of waste-study. You could have called it apatalology, for instance. 

But no one did.

Ah well.

Word To Use Today: garbology. A J Weberman coined this word in 1971 after going through Bob Dylan's dustbins. It became an academic subject in 1987 at the University of Arizona in a team led by William Rathje.