Two items on ADS-L with two-part back-formed verbs. One has old friends recently in the news, the other has a verb new to my files, but similar to some I’ve collected.
Archive for the ‘Back formation’ Category
New Year’s 2pbfv crop
January 3, 2016Briefly: circular word-formation
September 11, 2015Caught in an episode of CSI: NY a little while ago: a parole officer talking about a parolee who missed his most recent meeting:
I didn’t violate him. I decided to cut him some slack.
That’s the transitive verb violate ‘cite for a violation’. Intended as cop-talk, I assume.
That looks like a (simple) back-formation from the noun violation. But of course violation is itself a derived noun based on, yes, violate ‘break or fail to comply with (a rule or formal agreement)’ (NOAD2)
But the back-formation gives us a new sense of violate — actually, a new verb violate. So:
violate > violation > violate
Adjs in 2pbfVs
August 17, 2015Two recent reports on ADS-L, both from baseball talk, about two-part back-formed verbs (2pbfVs) that have Adj (rather than N) as the first element: to official-score (back-formed from official scorer) and to situational-hit (back-formed from situational hitting). These will turn out to be less novel than they appear at first.
Culinary Loc + V back-formed Vs
August 5, 2015Previously on this blog: a posting on the two-part back-formed V (2pbfV) to spit-roast (used literally with reference to cooking — ‘to roast on a spit’ — and also figuratively; the verb is back-formed from the synthetic compounds spit-roasting (PRP) and spit-roasted (PSP). Then a posting that refers to the spit-roast posting, refers to the culinary 2pbfV to pan-fry, and adds another culinary 2pbfV, to chicken-fry ‘to fry like chicken’, based on the PSP synthetic compound chicken-fried in chicken-fried steak.
Two of these culinary 2pbfVs, spit-roast and pan-fry, are of the form Loc + V, where Loc names a cooking location (on a spit, in a pan) and V denotes a method or technique of cooking (roast, fry). It turns out that the world of culinary Loc + V back-formed Vs is huge, embracing at least the following elements:
Loc: oven, pan, skillet, spit
V: roast, cook, fry, grill, toast, smoke, sear
Data postings
July 29, 2015A new feature in the set of “Linguistics notes” Pages on this blog: data postings, two so far. Each of them has three parts: an inventory of postings on the topic (from Language Log and this blog); “raw data” (a collection of numbered notes on examples (jottings on examples, observed on the fly or taken from e-mail, mailing lists, or blog postings); and an index to the examples, keyed to the numbered notes. All three types of material will be regularly updated.
Too much whelm
February 12, 2015
Carbon dating
December 5, 2014Today’s Dilbert is the latest in a series about a new worker in the office, a dinosaur in more senses than one:
Ouch: two senses of the verb date, one used here in a back-formed verb.
“We do not contracept”
November 30, 2014In the NYT on the 28th: “In Arizona, a Textbook Fuels a Broader Dispute Over Sex Education” by Rick Rojas, beginning:
Gilbert, Ariz. — The textbook, the one with the wide-eyed lemur peering off the cover, has been handed out for years to students in honors biology classes at the high schools here, offering lessons on bread-and-butter subjects like mitosis and meiosis, photosynthesis and anatomy.
But now, the school board in this suburb of Phoenix has voted to excise or redact two pages deep inside the book — 544 and 545 — because they discuss sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, including mifepristone, a drug that can be used to prevent or halt a pregnancy.
A law passed two years ago in Arizona requires schools to teach “preference, encouragement and support to childbirth and adoption” over abortion, and the school board decided that those pages were in violation of this law — even though the Arizona Education Department, which examined the book for compliance, found that they were not.
… the Gilbert school board is moving forward, trying to figure out how to remove the material in question — by way of black markers or scissors, if need be — despite resistance from parents, residents, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the district’s superintendent.
The big issue has to do with religious rights, and I will have a bit to say on that front. But my main goal here is to work my way up to the quote in the title of this posting and to look at it critically.
Morphology Friday 2: back-formed freedom-fight
October 3, 2014Today’s Doonesbury blast from the past:
Start with the synthetic compounds freedom fighter and freedom fighting. From which by back-formation comes a verb to freedom-fight, of the form N + V. Which then has a PST using the PST of its head fight: freedom-fought. Voilà.
Blowout, sleaze
September 1, 2014(Warning: This posting discusses gay sex in very plain terms and has images that are right on the X line — between X-rated and nominally for general consumption — but in recompense, there is some actual lexical discussion. Use your judgment.)
On AZBlogX, a piece “Blowout and sleaze” on two pieces of e-mail:
In my mailbox in recent days, a sale bulletin (“Labor Day Inventory Blowout”) for Falcon / Raging Stallion (today is Labor Day in the US) and an ad for a recent Channel 1 Releasing feature Sucked Off in Weird Places featuring Jason Phoenix and a very sleazy Johnny Hazzard. The images and the texts are both intensely oral.
Cropped versions of the images, right on the X line:
(#1)
(#2)
Ok, no question about what’s going on in these images, but here you see no acual naughty bits. Note blowout in the title of #1, and in #2, the normally well-groomed Johnny Hazzard (though presenting himself as working class) with sweaty face and greasy hair — definite sleaze. So some words about these two lexical items, then a few about the over-the-top rhetoric of the (advertising) sex for #2.