Arnold Zwicky's Blog

By day it looks like this:

(#1) The washateria ( = laundromat) at 37th and Guadalupe in Austin TX

But UT linguistics professor Steve Wechsler reports that at night, thanks to a defect in the lighting, it looks like this:

(#2) The Austin shateria: shat + the -eria variant of the libfix -((e)t)eria ‘commercial establishment selling X or offering Xing as a service’

I get two possible interpretations, both risible: either the base X is shat, one of the possible PST/PSPs of the verb shit (so that a shateria sells shit as a product or offers shitting as a service); or it’s Shat, a nickname for the actor William Shatner (so that a Shateria sells Shatneriana or offers Shatner’s professional services as an actor, writer, producer, director, or huckster).

The libfix. Although the libfix was first reported as -((e)t)eria, playfully named Austin laundromats seem mostly to be washaterias, with an a rather than an e in the spelling of /ǝ/ in the second syllable, and indeed washateria seems to be the dominant spelling these days.

For some background on the playful libfix, see the -((e)t)eria section of Zwicky & Pullum on plain and expressive morphology (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1987). The Google Ngram for washeteria / washateria shows both spellings attested throughout the history of the playful formation, but with a general preference for washateria, presumably a reflection of a favoring of a spellings for /ǝ/ in words perceived to be from the Anglo-Saxon stratum of the English vocabulary:

(#3) washeteria / washateria through 2008

The inflectional forms of the verb shit. There are three widely attested PST/PSPs of this verb (all listed in dictionaries, in particular NOAD): the completely regular shitted (compare pitted for the verb pit); the PST/PSP = BSE variant shit (compare hit for the verb hit); and the ablaut PST/PSP variant shat (compare sat for the verb sit). If I recall correctly, the second (in, say, The cat shit on my pillow this morning) is by far the most frequent, but the last is available for interpreting shateria < washateria.

William Shatner. I don’t know if he’s ever been nicknamed Shat (parallel to my being nicknamed Zwick, which has certainly happened), but at least some people who saw Steve Wechsler’s Facebook posting of #2 got that interpretation for shateria. From Wikipedia:

William Shatner (born March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor, author, producer, and director. In his seven decades of television, Shatner became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the Star Trek franchise.

(#4) Shatner in Star Trek

(#5) Shatner just before his 87th birthday

This entry was posted on April 27, 2018 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Inflection, Libfixes, Movies and tv. 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.