Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On Nancy Friedman’s Fritinancy blog on April 13, a posting on the libfix -nomics, taking off from the headline “Flawed Tigernomics”, about Tiger Woods’s foundering golf-course business. Friedman remarks that

“-nomics” continues to be the go-to suffix for every trend in search of a pseudo-scientific reason for being.

and goes on to cite a slew of –nomics words (well, -((o)n)omics words) that have sprung from economics over 50-plus years, all having something to do with economics, money, business, or accounting. The publication of Freakonomics in 2005 triggered an avalanche of fresh coinings — Geckonomics, Socialnomics, Spousonomics, Emotionomics, newsonomics, and so on — using the ‘money’ libfix, which is pronounced with /a/ in the penultimate syllable. (Ben Zimmer has a collection of examples here.)

Meanwhile, a separate libfix developed from the model genomics, ‘ the study of organisms in terms of their full DNA sequences, or genomes‘ (from Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column on the coinage culturomics; Language Log discussion here). There’s even a Wikipedia page on -omics coinages in biology. But culturomics ‘the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture’ takes the libfix — which is pronounced with /o/ in the penultimate syllable — in a new direction.

This entry was posted on April 18, 2011 at 7:26 am and is filed under Innovations, Libfixes, Links. 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.