But a large minority of the new Turkish words were formed carelessly, even arbitrarily. Turkish loves suffixes, so there is no objection to using them in order to create new vocabulary. But it would have been nice, to say the least, if these suffixes had been applied with a degree of consistency. In English, we assume that if -er or -or is added to a verb, the new word refers to someone or something performing the action expressed by the verb. When earlier in this chapter I used the word substitutor, you knew that this person’s activity was to substitute some thing for some other thing. You would be baffled if this person were to be called a substitute, a substitution or a substituting. Or to give another example, you understand immediately that something rehydratable can be rehydrated, and you could rightly accuse me of playing fast and loose with your beloved language if I were to impose something like rehydratesome, rehydratory or rehydratesque in its stead, not to mention rehydratal. Yet this is exactly what happened in Turkish. To give one example: since the root YAZ means ‘write’, it is clear to anyone that YAZIM, YAZIN and YAZIT must be semantically related. But there is just no way of telling that they mean ‘spelling’, ‘literature’ and ‘inscription’ respectively. The suffixes are arbitrary. These and many more examples are among the main reasons why Lewis’s book about the language reform has the subtitle A Catastrophic Success: the reform substantially harmed the language.