Sorry I’m late with this one. I’ve been avoidoing things.
No, that’s not a typo. (OK, maybe it was once, but I immediately saw its potential.) Even if you’ve never seen avoidoing before, you’ve surely engaged in it at some time. Famously, writers with something they need to write end up doing housework to avoid writing, and writers with housework to do end up writing to avoid doing housework. Between the two, ideally, they end up with a clean house and a finished manuscript, each of which was done while avoiding doing the other. By avoidoing one and then the other, they avoidid them both. But avoidone is a form of done!
You can see it, right? Avoiding + doing = avoidoing. And the past tense is naturally avoidone. You can also say avoidoes, avoidid, and avoido. The only question is whether, if you do A to avoid doing B, you are avoidoing A or B. I say you are avoidoing A.
Avoidoing has some juice, not just in usability but in form. It’s a nice merger of two well-known words (plus conjugational endings). Do is a classic basic verb that has come up from Old English and beyond that all the way to Proto-Indo-European, with many cognates in many languages with many forms due to sound changes, and speaking of which, it is the Great Vowel Shift in English that caused the original /oː/ (long /o/) to become /uː/, as in some other words too (two, to). Avoid, on the other hand, comes – as the presence of a v hints – from Latin by way of Old French, and the void is the same void as in the word void and is also related to vacuum. Which means that its first senses were on the order of ‘empty out’, ‘clear out’, and from that ‘leave’, ‘get out of the way’.
And so avoidoing takes avoiding and adds a void in the middle of it, o, which paradoxically takes on the stress – just as avoidoing does – and voids the avoidance by doing another otherwise evitable thing, and often avidly. And at such a busy time of the year, it’s a great way to get a lot of things done, since we can always have the relief of not doing something while we are avoidoing something else.
Sesquiotica 