Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman takes up (in “Whatpocalypse now?”) the libfix -pocalypse (in sportspocalypse, in particular), adding to the items in my recent inventory of postings, which I was pretty sure was incomplete (it’s not easy to assemble these lists, since many relevant postings don’t use the term libfix). The items that I missed concern libfixes that originated in portmanteaus and have the playful, ostentatious, or creative tone of what Geoff Pullum and I called expressive morphology (link in my previous posting).
Mark’s additions to the inventory:
BZ, 2/6/09: Shamockery and shank-a-potamus (link): on POST –apotamus
AZ, 12/11/09: Liciousness (link): on POST –licious
ML, 3/1/10: The half-life of the hashtag (link): on POST –mageddon, -pocalypse
ML: 7/20/10: Andrewlanche (link): on POST –lanche
None of these elements are on Quinion’s affixes list.
Then there are postings on snowmanteaus (-manteau is not in Quinion), some of which have final elements that seem to have been liberated:
AZBlog, 12/22/08: Portmansnow words (link): portmanteaus snowtastrophe [-tastrophe not in Quinion], snowpocalypse, snowmageddon
BZ Word Routes, 2/11/10: SnOMG! It’s Snowmageddon 2010 (link): snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, and more
AZBlog, 2/12/10: Portmansnow round 2 (link): on snowmanteaus in general
The most significant omission (that I’ve found so far) is
GP, 2/8/10: Isms, gasms, etc. (link)
In that posting, Geoff makes a distinction between suffixes, compound elements, and combining forms:
Of [the elements on a list], I think I’d say (it is a theoretical judgment) that only -like, -esque, -ward, and -ism should be called suffixes.
I think words ending in -proof, -master, and -kabob are best treated as compounds (formed of two roots, like treehouse, where tree isn’t a prefix and house isn’t a suffix). The element spelled -phile or -ophile is a Greek-derived combining form (neither a suffix nor a word, but a separate word-formation element nonetheless).
Geoff goes on to identify some expressive combining forms on the list:
POST –(a)thon [in Quinion]; -riffic, -go-round, -(i)licious, and –gasm [none in Quinion]
June 24, 2011 at 11:10 am |
From Russian, POST -nik:
beatnik, nogoodnik, peacenik, {jazz,folk}nik
Also POST -chik (from apparatchik) but I can only think of boychik & girlchik which are prestty much just diminutives.
June 25, 2011 at 10:25 am |
A reminder: these postings weren’t inventorying libfixes, but postings about libfixes. As it happens, I have posted about -nik (here).
But it’s not a libfix — rather, a derivational suffix borrowed from Yiddish and Russian (the role of sputnik was to make the suffix evident to a wider audience than it had before the launching of the satellite). Same with -chik, I think, though it hasn’t gotten enough use to make it into Quinion’s affix list.