Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Two items from yesterday’s “Metropoliltan Diary” in the New York Times. One on pragmatics and gender, one of morphology and sex.

First:

“A Cross-Dresser on the M4” by Brad Rothschild

My 12-year-old son, Jordan, was talking with a friend outside our apartment after school the other day:

Friend: “I saw a cross-dresser on the M4 bus.”

Jordan: “Really? You take the M4?”

The cross-dresser wasn’t notable to Jordan; cross-dressers are just art of the background. But, in the context, taking the M4 was unexpected and worthy of comment.

Second:

“Committed, Sort Of” by Johanna Henry

Overheard entering a Chelsea subway station:

“We’re not monogamous; we’re monogamish.”

They’re in a sort-of-open relationship, presumably allowing other partners in exceptional circumstances. That might have been characterized as monogamousish or monogamous-ish (and there are cites for these), but collapsing the two suffixes into one gives the shorter (and easier) monogamish (and there are many more cites for this), which is a half-rhyme to monogamous. One site attributes the coinage to sex columnist Dan Savage.

This entry was posted on March 26, 2013 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Morphology, Pragmatics. 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.