Short shot #20: California + ify

Suppose you want to convert the noun California into a verb meaning ’cause to be like California’ or ’cause to be like Californians’. English has several productive schemes for N-to-V conversion, among them (all examples made up so as to make them parallel):

zero derivation (direct conversion): They are trying to Manhattan Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ize: They are trying to Manhattanize Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ify: They are trying to Manhattanify Palo Alto.

suffixation with -ic-ate: They are trying to Manhattanicate Palo Alto.

Zero derivation is the least satisfactory of these alternatives, because it allows for such a wide range of interpretations, but the other three are causative. My impression is that -ic-ate is by far the least frequent formation for N-to-V innovations (though it’s not really possible to search specifically for innovations). But -ize and -ify are both frequent in this function.

Both -ize and -ify are somewhat uncomfortable with bases that end in a vowel, especially an unaccented vowel, especially schwa (as in California); Californiaify is awkward indeed, though there are a few hits for it, like this one:

How is my lil’ Californiaified-​Akronite doing!? (link)

Usually the base is simplified to some degree. Here’s Californiafy from Paul Krugman’s NYT column on November 9 (“Paranoia Strikes Deep”):

… what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

Or, more often hiatus is avoided completely by further reduction, in Californify:

At any rate, not only am I Californified, but apparently Pico is too. The dog that used to race out into the rain has developed some pretty refined tastes when it comes to weather … (link)

Anna Friel has been…Californified? Okay, that’s not even a word — Californified! Hah. But really, how would you call it? (link)

Note the recognition in this last quote that the verb is an innovation.

Pants-lower

Having posted on the back-formed verb shirt-lift a while ago — a verb based on the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in two families of senses) — I had hopes of coming across the corresponding verb pants-lower (with pants either in the mostly U.S. sense ‘trousers’ or in the sense ‘underpants’). Certainly, visual depictions of the act in question are easy to find in some places, and you can find plenty of references to pants-lowering on the web, indeed references to many different kinds of pants-lowering, from hip-hop pants-lowering to ordinary pants-lowering in undressing and the like.

I was particularly interested in pants-lowering as a sexual display, analogous to the “torso display” kind of shirt-lifting. Here’s a relatively modest example from an underwear ad (primarily aimed at a gay male audience — men who can both appreciate the display and identify with the model):

The model is shown on the right performing a first-stage pants-lowering maneuver, the beginning of a strip tease. We don’t see any pubic hair (but maybe he shaves his pubes), and not even the base of his penis.

On linguistic matters: lots of relevant hits for the synthetic compound pants-lowering, but (unsurprisingly) none for the awkward synthetic compound pants-lowerer. And none for back-formed verb to pants-lower, though you can imagine situations where it could be useful. Maybe it will crop up eventually; fresh 2-part back-formed verbs turn up with some regularity.

Short shot #17: Fanshawe the mononome

Ian Frazier’s “Fanshawe”, a humor piece in the November 2 New Yorker, begins:

Fanshawe had just the one name.

Later:

In college, Fanshawe’s social set had included an unusual number of men–Neuman,Farrel, Fogel, Harrison, Fegley, Carson, Foster, Ferguson, Sapers, Miles, Northon, Winslow–who were mononomes like himself.

Mononome is a wonderful morphological invention, immediately interpretable in context.

Fanshawe the mononome immediately reminded me of Mr. Spiggott in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch “One Leg Too Few”, about a one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan, “a role which traditionally involves the use of a two-legged actor” and so wouldn’t normally be taken by a “unidexter”.

Composite puzzles

From the front page of today’s New York Times, “Diverse Sources Pour Cash Into Taliban’s War Chest” by Eric Schmitt:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations, raising hundred of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations …

A point of linguistic interest is the composite nominal insurgent operations, in particular its first element, insurgent: noun or adjective? It has uses as a noun (OED2 has it from 1765) and uses as an adjective (from 1814 in OED2).

Either is possible. The whole nominal could be a compound noun meaning, roughly, ‘operations by insurgents’, parallel to invader operations:

US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of US invader operations, claimed that two crewmen escaped injury and the helicopter was recovered. (link)

Or the nominal could involve a “non-predicating adjective” insurgent, in a composite with an adjective understood not as predicating some property of the head noun but as evoking some noun — as in electrical engineer (where electricity is evoked) and transformational grammar (where transformation(s) is evoked) — a type of nominal discussed several times on Language Log, for instance here.

What makes things tricky is that if insurgent is a non-predicating adjective in insurgent operations, then the evoked noun is the noun insurgent(s). Whoops.

publicate

Ian Frazier, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece “Scratch and Sniff” (October 19, p. 30), about police dogs that sniff out cell phones:

Captain Matthew Kyle: “We don’t want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. It’s an organic substance that’s in all cell phones–leave it at that.”

What caught my eye was the verb publicate ‘make public, advertise’ (a verbing of the adjective public via suffixation with -ate), which I didn’t recall having seen before. Was it a recent innovation?

Well, you probably know where this story is going to go now.

Zits morphology

Jeremy confronts English morphology.

Bored is an adjective (converted from the PSP of the verb bore), so it’s easy to get a derived negative adjective in un-. Which can then be interpreted as a form of a reversative verb un-bore. And the way is clear to a repetitive re-bore.

Short shot #16: Euro-words

In the October 10th Economist there’s a leader (“Wake up Europe!”, p. 13), on current events in the European Union, with some nice Euro- words in it:

[on the EU constitution] Some Eurosceptics want to fight on, hoping that a Tory victory in Britain could mean a new referendum.

[on the presidency of the EU] One could imagine, say, Angela Merkel sitting down as an equal with Presidents Obama and Hu; but she has another job. So the choice is the usual Europygmies or Tony Blair …

Neither word is brand-new. Euroscepticism and Eurosceptic have been around long enough for the first to get a Wikipedia page (where you can also find Europhilia). The Economist seems to be especially fond of Europygmy, but others have used it, since at least 2002.

(Spelling varies on these words. You can find Europygmies, Euro pygmies, and europygmies, and similarly for the others.)

Euro- words get their first element from the word Europe, and their second element is usually a free-standing word (as in Europygmy), though sometimes it’s a combining form (like -phile) or an element extracted from a larger word (like the vision of Eurovision, extracted from television). These words then often look like portmanteaus in their origin, but in any case act like compounds morphologically.

Michael Quinion’s Ologies and Isms has an entry for Euro-, with more details (including some items with the variant Eur-) . What it doesn’t say is that Euro-words have two accent patterns, differing in which of the two parts has the heavier accent: the first in Eurovision and Europhile, the second in Eurocommunism and Eurocentric. (Alternative accent patterns are well-known for many types of compounds.) I suspect that some people vary in their treatment of certain specific words, but I haven’t looked at the matter in any detail, nor have I examined the factors that are relevant to the choice of one pattern or the other.

premise(s)

Ned Deily reports coming across this sign in a San Francisco store window:

THIS PREMISE
IS UNDER 24 HR.
VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

Yes, this premise is, rather than these premises are. The result is something that looks like an instance of the logical term premise (so that Deily posted a photo of the sign on Facebook under the heading “department of rhetorical security”), rather than the ‘house or building’ word.

The ways of plurals in English are intricate indeed, and premise(s) exhibits several of these intricacies.

More sexual back-formations

Having stumbled into a discussion of the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in several senses) and the back-formed verb to shirt-lift historically derived from them, I was moved to explore some other possible sexual back-formations. Given cock-sucking and cock-sucker, had people invented a back-formed verb to cock-suck (however spelled)?

The answer is: yes, big time.

Bags

Ad for Chex Mix: “a bag of interesting”. The phrase is even trademarked.

This is an adjective zero-converted into a mass noun — an instance of a larger pattern that Neal Whitman (summarizing earlier discussion) posted about a while back, under the heading “Buckets, Boxes, and Bags”, about

bucket/box/bag of awesome [Adj] / fail [V]

and related expressions conveying high degree (of awesomeness and failing, in these examples; of interestingness, in the Chex Mix case).

The ‘large amount’ or ‘high degree’ component of meaning is contributed by the head noun – bucket, box, or bag in these examples, but others are attested (see the comments on Neal’s posting): bowl, bottle, world, shipment, etc. (often modified by high-amount adjectives like big or giant). The converted words are affectively marked, as positive (interesting, awesome) or negative (fail as above, awful in the following example).

Steve Jobs would call this a bag of awful.

(an allusion to Jobs saying that Blu-Ray is “a bag of hurt”).

A few more words about extended senses of bag, in addition to uses with nounings. There are uses with ordinary partitive complements (of + NP), to sum up a state (cf. bundle):

Jethro had turned into a bag of bad temper. He would be eight next week and his big brother had promised to take him deep sea fishing when he was that old. Now Thomas said he was too small to go! (link)

Apparently she freaked the mediums out and some of them actually demanded she leave. One relayed the message that “she was a bag of bad energy,” and that her aura was telling the spirits to “back off.” (link)

And ‘large amount’ uses with partitives, similar to such uses of bunch, pile, and the like:

At least your wife will have something to show for shopping. She will NOT be acquiring a bag of bad habits, at the end of your bad dream vacation. But you will [in playing golf], I guarantee it. (link)

Finally, there’s an insult that was new to me (and to comedian Louis CK, who riffs on it in this video): “Suck a bag of dicks!” (conveying, roughly, ‘Fuck you!’).

(None of these uses of bag made it into OED2.)