Victor Steinbok posted this Get Fuzzy cartoon (from 26 April) to the American Dialect Society mailing list a little while back:
The focus is of course on the neologism peoplefy, which puzzled Steinbok a bit. It seemed pretty clear to me: Bucky is providing analogues to cats’ feelings about sharks (that they are both delicious and dangerous) in terms that would make sense to people, Bucky and Satchel’s owner Rob Wilco in particular.Steinbok than asked about N+fy verbings like peoplefy. I noted that N+ify verbings (and the N+ifaction nominalizations of them) were all over the place, but that N+fy was much rarer, though it does occur. (I’m assuming that peoplefy is people+fy rather than peopl+efy, though –efy does occur as a variant of –ify, in words like liquefy, rarefy, and stupefy.)
There are other uses of peoplefy out there. You can google up a moderate number of webpages with the modifier peoplefied used of wild creatures, squirrels in particular, that have become accustomed to people. And there’s a site where the writer contrasts objectifying people with peoplefying objects (that is, personifying them). Finally, there’s Peoplefy, a Pune (India)-based “HR solutions firm”.
Meanwhile, there’s at least one case of people+ify, in postings about the “Peopleification” of the NYT crossword puzzles (apparently, making them like the crossword puzzles in People magazine, with their many references to celebrities).
(Oh yes, the Canadian politician, author, former NHL goaltender, etc. Ken Dryden is referred to every so often in Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy.)
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