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Comment by truculent | Hacker News Reader

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Child-raiser is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say child-raisers we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

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child-riser is a lovely neologism, more self-explanatory than caretaker, but still caretaker is well established.

and to clarify: I chuckled with sympathy reading your response :-)

It's not that it's bad neologism. It's that neologism is bad in general. :-)

New words are bad in general? How so?

Change is hard and expensive. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.

Far too often those introducing new words (or even worse redefining existing ones) are playing power games with their in groups best interests in mind, not the rest of us.

Every word you just wrote was a neologism at some point.

Caretaker is not well-established where I am. A caretaker takes care of grounds of schools and other similar large buildings.

I see. and that's indeed one of the two main meanings.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caretaker

hmmm is there some extended n-gram search these days where you can search for a specific word *with a specific meaning*?

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