This is how it happens:

I heard a young person use “flustrated” during a call to a radio show host this morning. Something like:  “He just won’t return my calls.  I’m so flustrated.”

I’d heard this “word” used several times.  I was always quite sure that it wasn’t a legitimate English word.  Indeed, I assumed it was used only by the uneducated.  It was, to me, clearly an inadvertent, erroneous and abusive mixture of “flustered” and “frustrated.”

So, to the internet I went.

And, what did I find?

Well, I wasn’t all that surprised to see the word listed in the Urban Dictionary.  Yet, there it was in Dictionary.com too, where it was listed only as an adjective – meaning “flustered; agitated.”

What killed me though was that Dictionary.com also listed “flusterated” as a word.  OMG!!!  (I did not have the strength to go back to these sources to see if they listed “frusterated” as a word.)

I was clearly flummoxed.

So, quickly to Merriam-Webster online, which refers to itself as “An Encyclopaedia Britannica Company.”  Surely, IT would not see “flustrated” as a legitimate part of our language.

Drat!  Not only did I find “flustrated,” but “flusterated” was listed as a “variant.”  And, hold your breath, there was “flustration” too.  Where does this all end?

At this point, I was not surprised to find “flustrated” in Wiktionary.  There, under “Etymology,” a “blend” of “flustered” and “frustrated.”

What are we to make of this?

Here’s the way I look at this:  “Flustrated” is NOT a legitimate word.  Why do I see it this way?  Simple.  Ask yourself this (here’s my test):  “Do I believe that persons who use this “word” believe it to mean anything different from “frustrated”?  Or, put it this way:  “Do persons who use the word “flustrated” ever use the word “frustrated” (to mean something different)?  Or do they simply believe that the word to use when they’re feeling frustrated is “flustrated”?

And, ask yourself this:  “Would I ever used the word “flustrated” in a writing?

(Apparently, the spell-check on my Word program has not caught up with the current vernacular, as “flustrated” comes up as not being a word.)

I say again folks:  This is how it happens.