Heard on MSNBC on 1/9, a reporter on scene at the Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles, noting that looterers had become a problem — using, not the agent noun looter, based on the established verb loot, but the agent noun looterer, based on the innovative verb looter (a verbing of the noun looter). A looterer is someone engaged in lootering, which is a kind of looting.
The question is why the reporter went for the elaborate innovative noun looterer rather than the simpler established noun looter. In the context, it was clearly not a mistake, and the reporter repeated it. And then it turns out that the usage wasn’t her invention on the spot; the verb looter and its derived agent noun looterer are attested from others. Even with reference to the Los Angeles fires; from the iHeart podcasts about the fires:
2 days ago — That’s just the estimate. Speaker 2 (00:43): So the Los Angeles Police arrested a possible arson suspect … twenty looterers have been arrested
In detail. NOAD says the verb loot ‘steal goods from (a place), typically during a war or riot’ came first historically, then the noun loot ‘goods, especially private property, taken from an enemy in war; stolen money or valuables’. From the verb, with the agentive –er suffix, the noun looter ‘a person who steals goods, typically during a war or riot’.
More recently, looter has been verbed, giving us another verb that roughly means ‘to loot’.
In earlier work — my 2010 Stanford SemFest 11 paper “Brevity plus” (the abstract for which I’ve included in an appendix to this posting), I looked at morphologcal innovations (zero and subtractive conversions) that are roughly similar in meaning to existing expressions but have the virtue of brevity, pointing out that these innovations generally have the further virtue of semantic / pragmatic specificity, allowing for shadings of meaning that are fuzzed over in the older expressions. Now I observe that this specificity effect is independent of brevity; innovations like the verb looter can be longer than older alternatives (in this case, the older verb loot) but co-exist with them because the innovations are useful — because they express some specific element of contact.
So we get looter in an ad for a video game involving adventuring, plundering, lootering (with intransitive looter) and a TikTok category PNG [Papua New Guinea] lootering stores (with transitive looter), and the verb looter can serve as the base for the derived agentive noun looter (examples above). The extra dollop of meaning in the verb looter (over plain loot) seems to be purposefulness and planning; lootering is systematic looting, not just fortuitous stealing of property that looters come across during war or rioting. (But my hypothesis needs to be tested with a larger sample of examples and interviews with speakers and writers; searching for examples in context is difficult in any case — the agent noun looter and the verb loiter interfere with searches — and now seems to be even more difficult in AI-guided search.)
Appendix. From my 2/15/10 posting “Brevity plus”: the abstract for my Stanford SemFest 11 paper on 3/12/10:
The innovation and spread of lexical items very often is favored by considerations of brevity: items are invented by some people and adopted by others because they are more compact than earlier expressions. (And for some reasons not having to do with formal considerations: they have the virtue of novelty, suggesting fashion, ostentatious cleverness, or playfulness; and they usually have the virtue of contextual or social specificity, via ties to specific contexts, like sports, journalism, business, radio/television, the tech world, gaming, etc., or to specific social groups, like young people, Australians, women, etc.)
But these innovations also frequently (perhaps almost always) have the virtue of semantic/pragmatic specificity. The innovations usually allow for shadings of meaning that are fuzzed over in the older expressions (which, typically, have radiated and generalized in their meanings over the years). This point is scarcely a new one, but it tends to be buried by usage writers and language peevers who are hostile to innovations and treat them as “unnecessary”.
Here I look mostly at category conversions in English, in particular zero conversions and subtractive conversions (back-formations), concentrating on plain nounings (a disconnect vs. a disconnection), plain verbings (to extinct vs. to make extinct, drive to extinction), simple back-formations of verbs (to incent vs. to provide an incentive), and two-part back-formations of verbs (to cheerlead vs. to serve as a cheerleader). The larger point is that people have good (if unconscious) reasons for creating and adopting such innovations.
The full handout is available on-line, here.
January 13, 2025 at 7:30 am |
From Robert Coren, this comment: