Arnold Zwicky's Blog

OUT magazine June/July 2011, p. 21, letters about Glenn Greenwald:

I could not admire Greenwald more – they don’t call him Glennzilla for nothin’. (Glenn Marc)

Glennzilla’s writing is often depressing, … but following his column has made me a more savvy observer of our political process. (Bob S.)

Yes, Glennzilla (many more cites), attaching the libfix -zilla to Greenwald’s first name. In turn, -zilla has been liberated from Godzilla, which began life as a portmanteau in Japanese (Gojira) — a not uncommon development of a libfix from a portmanteau.

[About Greenwald, from the Wikipedia entry:

Glenn Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author. Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator prior to becoming a contributor (columnist and blogger) to Salon.com, where he focuses on political and legal topics. [He’s also the author of three books.]

He’s gay, and partnered.]

The libfix -zilla (connoting size, significance, awesomeness, or fearsomeness) hasn’t made it into Michael Quinion’s affixes site yet, but instances have been chronicled elsewhere:

mumzilla (here) and planzilla (here) in the Double-Tongued Dictionary

promzilla (here) and bridezilla (here) in Word Spy

panty-hose-zilla (here), beardzilla (here), and godcomplexzilla (here) in Wordlustitude

No doubt there are many more impressive -zillas to be found.

Now about Godzilla, from the Wikipedia entry:

Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda’s 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games, novels, comic books, television series, and an American remake.

… Gojira (ゴジラ?) is a combination [that is, portmanteau] of two Japanese words: gorira (ゴリラ, “gorilla”), and kujira (鯨（クジラ, “whale”), which is fitting because in one planning stage, Godzilla was described as “a cross between a gorilla and a whale”, alluding to his size, power and aquatic origin.

Godzilla is an Anglicization of Gojira. Splitting off -zilla recuts the parts of the Japanese original, since the dz corresponds to the j of kujira (with the d assigned to the first element in English, the z to they second). Giving us a libfixzilla.

This entry was posted on May 22, 2011 at 8:43 am and is filed under Libfixes, Morphology, Playful morphology, Portmanteaus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.