I love efficiency—that includes efficient language. Among some beautiful words in my native language is “Verschlimmbesserung”, a composite-noun meaning: An intended improvement, which in reality, makes a thing, condition, process or other worse.^[1] And it even comes in the form of a verb as well: “verschlimmbessern“, which translates to “making something worse while trying to improve it“.

Verschlimmbesserung combines two nouns with opposite meanings into one. Let‘s quickly disassemble it before I use it to describe some product changes. The two words are “Verschlimmerung“, meaning “a worsening”, and “Verbesserung“, meaning “an improvement”. Extracting the core of these two words, we are left with “schlimm“, meaning “bad”, and “besser“, meaning “better”.^[2] By composing these two cores the same way each of the two was originally composed into its own word, we get Ver•schlimm•besser•ung.

It is similar to “disimprovement“, but I miss the positive intention in the English interpretation of the word. The German version assumes you wanted to improve things, whereas, in English, I can only see a factual description of having made something worse. Being a non-native English speaker, I could, of course, be wrong. I will use Verschlimmbesserung instead of disimprovement whenever I believe the change was supposed to improve things.

⌞w⌝