Guestography

06:04 Nov 20, 2015 

I know. But look at the corresponding question:

http://www.proz.com/kudoz/English/tourism_travel/5990128-und...

Quote:
"Promise One

Understanding each guest as a unique individual"

This smells like marketing...

06:02 Nov 20, 2015 

It is possible that the person who claims to be a "guestographer" takes the word seriously, but of course that doesn't mean anyone else should :) I mean, anyone who did so would be inviting ridicule, even among industry peers, I would have thought. It depends what you mean by serious. I imagine that someone might seriously claim to have an informed understanding of guests, based on study (and that might not even be a spurious claim), but to elevate that to the category of an "ography" without any element of irony would be making yourself look pretty silly. It could happen, I agree.

05:54 Nov 20, 2015 

In today's world and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I just cannot be sure that this is not to be taken seriously.

I may have been scarred by reading too many science and marketing papers that were written by people whose desire for self-importance cannot be understated.

05:33 Nov 20, 2015 

"The only practical issue here is whether or how you can do this in Arabic."

Yes, that was what I was about to write. Unfortunately, I know too little Arabic to have an opinion here.

I did find the distinction drawn here rather interesting, though:
"The suffix -logy refers to the investigative sciences and -graphy refers to the descriptive sciences. The root sciences, where applicable, are shown in brackets."
http://www.quick-facts.co.uk/science/ologies.html

05:31 Nov 20, 2015 

There was a British Telecom ad on British TV in the 1980s in which Maureen Lipman consoled her grandson, who had failed everything but pottery and sociology in his GCSEs, by saying "An ology? He got an ology! You get an ology, you're a scientist!"

05:28 Nov 20, 2015 

This is just a word they've made up, probably tongue in cheek. Add "-ography" or (as Cilian says) more usually "-ology" to anything you like and you have "the science of X". There are endless examples out there, and those that coin them don't usually intend to suggest that they are real scientific disciplines; it's more a matter of know-how and experience.

The only practical issue here is whether or how you can do this in Arabic. Ideally what you want to do is to take a suffix or other morpheme regularly used to mean "the science of" and add it to the word for "guest". I've no idea whether that's possible. But the meaning of this term is simply the (pseudo)scientific study of guests; there's no more to it than that.

01:04 Nov 20, 2015 

@ Björn
Yep, exactly! Somone thought they'd slap a Greek-derived ending meaning "field of study" or "writing" (here the former) onto "guest" and hey presto we have a pseudo-scientific word. Let's hope it doesn't catch on!

You should put it as an answer anyway.

As for "guestology" well, perhaps that might smack too much of "codology" which is what this amounts to.

00:27 Nov 20, 2015 

guestology would've been closer to the mark... but that's neither here nor there

22:57 Nov 19, 2015 

It's based on terms such as

Geography
Calligraphy

or as Wiki says:
"The English suffix -graphy means either "writing" or a "field of study", and is an anglicization of the French -graphie inherited from the Latin -graphia, which is a transliterated direct borrowing from Greek."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-graphy

So they thought: We want to study guests? We need a new discipline for it. What are we going to name it? Well, no time. Just add -graphy to guest and we're all scientists now.

22:38 Nov 19, 2015 

Hi,
Unfortunately, this terms does not have an Arabic equivalent. Therefore, I tend to know a simpler form of the definition to render it into Arabic.

22:34 Nov 19, 2015 

is your question asker? You have a definition - there are doubtless other definitions on the web - possibly also some synonyms