Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Bizarro:

A play on the uses of the suffix -ese.

Michael Quinion’s Affixes site gives two primary uses for -ese forming adjectives and nouns:

(a) those denoting “an inhabitant or language of a city or country”, or more broadly, denoting something associated with a city or region or country: Cantonese, Japanese, Maltese, Nepalese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Viennese … Some glossonym (language-name) uses are clearly nouns (She spoke in Cantonese; He learned Japanese in a month), while some toponym (place-name) uses are clearly (pseudo-)adjectives (a Japanese fan, Viennese coffee), and other examples are harder to characterize. (This is a rich field for investigation.)

(b) as common nouns that

are often derogatory, referring in particular to written language from a given source that is considered to be in a poor style: journalese, officialese (and bureaucratese), legalese, novelese (a style of writing supposedly characteristic of inferior novels). New examples continue to be formed: computerese (the supposedly incomprehensive technical jargon of computing), jargonese. A rare example that is not derogatory is motherese (child-directed speech).

The Bizarro cartoon has legalese as in (b), but with the syntax of a glossonym as in (a). It goes both ways.

This entry was posted on August 4, 2014 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, Derivation, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology. 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.