The American actress Andie MacDowell was just on telly advertising something called Revitalift from L'Oréal (no links, I don't want to encourage them). Apparently, it has some semi-miraculous skin-taughtening property.
I'm pretty sure we don't need the word taughtening. Surely tightening would suffice.
Comments:
There are very many words that we don't need in this world - how about "homeopathy", or "McDonalds" for example (just to pick some at random..)?
My dears....you have no idea how many meetings that would have taken. There's way too much money involved to rely on existing words and science. "Reduces the appearance of" "nourishes the skin" "revitalises the parts other beers cannot reach". You can fool all the people some of the time, and with cosmetic ads, words and phrases...all of the time. It's only a matter of time before they manage to bring star signs into it. " A new replenishing moisturiser, designed to smoothen the most discriminating Yorkshire Sagittarian" (saggy t'arian, geddit? Oh please yourselves)
That just about sums up marketing; Invent something that nodody needs, convince the target market that they do & then sell it to them at twice the price that they can afford!
The study of tautening is tautology. We need it. We don't need Andie McDowell, though, she can't act.