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.

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.

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.)

More nounings

In my brief treatment of The Ants Are My Friends, I neglected to mention this bit from the book (p. 11):

There are panels throughout [the book] where I’ve put together similar examples or sources of mishear or mis-speak …

This has mishear and mis-speak as mass nouns zero-derived from the verbs mishear and mis-speak (try not to worry about the hyphenation). News to me, but then I’m always coming across new stuff.

Now I see that there are count nounings as well:

In any case, the number of syllables in “if you could close the gimmick” don’t match up with the audio. This is clearly a mis-hear. (link)

Just noticed what I think was a mis-hear: … (link)

At least Mrs. Bush can claim possible senility for some mis-speaks. (link)

SOME MIS-SPEAKS BY SPOKESMEN OF THE LORD (link)

Nouning marches on.

Short shot #11: haul-fail

From Virginia Heffernan, “Uploading the Avant-Garde”, NYT Magazine 9/6/09 (p. 15):

But what’s surprising is how little the home-made videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more – and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?). And the haul people and fail people evidently don’t feel underserved; they are helping themselves and creating what can only be called an art scene, all around the many, many videos of their genre on YouTube.

The relevant nouning of the verb haul has been around for some time; OED2 has an entry for

fig. The act of ‘drawing’ or making a large profit or valuable acquisition of any kind; concr. the thing or amount thus gained or acquired.

with cites from 1776 (Abigail Adams, “I think we made a fine haul of prizes”) on. But its use as a modifier, in noun-noun compounds like haul video and haul people, might be recent.

Nounings of fail do seem to be recent — and recently very popular in some circles. There’s been a lot of writing about both count uses, as in the top ten fails and fail blog ‘a blog about fails’ (parallel to fail video), and mass uses as well, as in a bucket of fail. See, among other recent items, my posting here, Neal Whitman’s posting here, and Ben Zimmer’s column in the NYT Magazine and his Word Routes column.

Now we get haul and fail together.

Short shot #9: a tough get

[I'm several days into suffering from a dreadful intestinal virus, which among other things has deranged my nights. I've been playing KQED on the radio, to keep me company and absorb my attention. So I've picked up various odds and ends, from this source and some others.]

I’ll start with one from KQED’s Morning Edition this morning, where sports writer John Feinstein reflected on Rafael Nadal’s chances in the U.S. Open tennis tournament, saying “it’s a tough get”, meaning that the championship would be a tough thing for Nadal to get.

This is a zero nouning (a direct conversion) of the verb get. As with so many very frequent verbs, the nouning of get has been going on for a very long time, but not quite in this sense.

Short shot #8: more on grow

Following up on my recent posting on the noun grow … Danny Bloom has pointed me to some material that suggests a different route to it than simple nouning.

It turns out that there are plenty of hits for marijuana grow operation (and some for marijuana grow-op), and even more for marijuana growing operation (and some for marijuana growing op). These expressions are used to refer to both outdoor and indoor operations, but, crucially, they’re primarily to refer to the enterprises in question, and only secondarily (if at all) to the places where these enterprises are carried on.

Start with the fullest and most standard variant:

Officers in San Francisco uncovered a marijuana growing operation in a home in the city’s Sunset District on Wednesday afternoon. (link)

Then, clip growing to grow:

Federal and local law enforcement agents confiscated roughly 30000 marijuana plants growing among pine trees in the Pike National Forest. (link)

Then clip operation to op, either with growing:

Marijuana growing op in Miami mall storage area busted (link)

or with grow:

300-plant marijuana grow-op busted in North Van forest (link)

Then it’s just a step to marijuana grow on its own, with various senses having to do with pot growing (and of course to grow on its own, with the domain understood from context):

Tribal police raid Mexican marijuana grow site (link)

Washington’s Cannabis Eradication Response Team members raid a marijuana grow near Harrah, Wash. (link)

Record marijuana grow pulled up by the roots in Siskiyou County (link)

There are hits for parallel expressions with pot or cannabis rather than marijuana in them, but my task here is not to survey all possible expressions in this domain.

Short shot #7: ask and want

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky:

I just heard somebody say, into his phone on a business conversation about fees and stuff “The way it’s structured you’ll have some ask on wants.”

This has two nounings (of verbs) in a short space, which is pretty dense. The first, ask, is one I’ve posted about on Language Log, though the usage here is not quite like the ones I posted about. The second, want, is (in the sense here) of some age in English.

A grow

A New York Times story (“Deep in California Forests, An Illicit Business Thrives”, by Jesse McKinley, 8/22/09) tells us about Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department officers hunting for

… workers at one of the scores of remote, highly organized outdoor marijuana “grows” that dot the vast forests of California, largely on federal property.

Of course, I picked up on the nouning grow (a count noun meaning, roughly, ‘plot of land under cultivation for a crop’). And was shocked, shocked to realize that the English language had no word for this concept — no “word”, in the sense ‘ordinary-language fixed expression of some currency’ (see discussion here). Appalling! What simple creatures English speakers must be, able to make specific distinctions — fields, vineyards, (rice) paddies, orchards, gardens, (pot) grows, etc. — but hobbled by their inability to conceive of the overarching abstraction! But that’s the way of primitive peoples.

Short shot #6: adverbial scary

Ann Burlingham wrote me a while back with a sighting of innovative scary different, roughly ’scarily different, different in a scary way’. It’s from Business Week, in a quote:

Even stronger government intervention may be required, several economists said on Mar. 4. “I’ve gone through a number of cycles as an economist on Wall Street, but this one’s different,” says Brian Fabbri, chief economist for BNP Paribas. “This one’s scary different.” (link)

Googling on {“scary different”} pulls up a number of instances that are pretty clearly conveying ‘both scary and different’, but also some predicative examples like the one above, for instance:

It is amazing. It is fun. It is exciting. It is always different but never scary different. It’s enlighteningly different, fun different. (link)

Note the pairing with the adverb enlighteningly. And the adverbial use of fun, conveying ‘in a fun way’ (with the innovative use of fun as an adjective). Here’s another pairing with fun:

The sushi rolls are a little different from the usual California roll and spicy tuna roll – not scary different, but a fun kind of different. (link)

Adverbial scary can modify some other adjectives:

They’re scary huge, but oh so tasty. (link)

There are probably other adjectives, beyond scary and fun, that have been adverbialized (“adved”?).