While checking out a website today, I learned another ugly yet practical neologism - informatics. Once I read the definition given in an online medical dictionary, I was forced to concede that this is another one of those ungraceful coinages that fill an important niche, like compactified. What interested me was that www.dictionary.com said that the word was chiefly Brit I saw the word on a British website, and on running the word past my spell-checkers, it was accepted without a second glance by the British and Australian spell-checkers installed, but balked at by the American English spell-checker. I mention this by way of a defence against any who say that only Americans are capable of coming up with with truly ugly neologisms. I'm not saying that informatics is up there with prioritise, but it is certainly giving compactified a run for its money. Whoever said that Truth is Beauty had obviously never had to read late 20th/early 21st Century scientific English.