I heard this earlier today on CNN.

Problem:
The word “interventionalists” is non-standard English.

Explanation:
Someone on the CNN television channel this morning was interviewing physician-turned-TV-commentator Sanjay Gupta about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the impact of yesterday’s U.S. Airways plane crash in the Hudson River on the plane’s passengers and crew.

Gupta was talking about the importance of psychological intervention to prevent PTSD among the passengers and crew.

Gupta started his sentence with “The goal of these interventionalists …”.

I had never heard the word “interventionalist”, so I tried to find it in a dictionary but failed.

Apparently Gupta thought that he could add the suffix “ist” to the perfectly appropriate adjective “interventional” to form a noun for someone who practices intervention.

Instead, he should have added the suffix “ist” to the noun “intervention” to form the noun for someone who practices intervention.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “interventionist” — 1,770,000 matches
• “interventionalist” — 52,600 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “interventionist” versus the incorrect “interventionalist” by a ratio of 33.7-to-1, which is very good.

Solution:
“The goal of these interventionists …”