Archive for the ‘Back formation’ Category
June 26, 2014
For years it was clasped firmly in the embrace of a plastic device with a magnetic strip on the back, which allowed it to be displayed on a refrigerator (or other metal surface). But then it somehow slipped out and, being almost weightless, wafted away on some breath of a breeze, until eventually it was discovered by a visitor, on the floor far from the refrigerator.
It’s a Chinese paper cut, depicting my animal from the Chinese zodiac, the dragon:
A gift from the students in my 1985 classes at the Beijing Language Institute (as it was then).
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Posted in Art/lit/music/film, Back formation, Compounds, Nouning | Leave a Comment »
October 4, 2013
In the latest (October 7th) New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece, “Dept. of Accumulation: Ballhawks” by Reeves Wiedeman, beginning:
Zack Hample caught his first major-league baseball when he was twelve — a defining moment in most American childhoods, but one that left him unsatisfied. If I can catch one ball, he thought, why not a thousand? Two decades later, a thirty-six-year-old bookstore clerk, with a shaved head and a soul patch, he is now the world’s preëminent ballhawk.
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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Metaphor, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
August 20, 2013
From yesterday’s “Metropolitan Diary” in the NYT”, “At Kerouac’s Old Place, No Scatting Allowed”, by Carol Knauder:
I love the unintentional typo of the sign in the courtyard of my sister’s West Village apartment building, where it’s rumored Jack Kerouac once lived.
Taken at face value, though, I do wonder why a no scatting zone would be necessary in this day and age. I then imagine under the sign an illustration of Ella Fitzgerald scatting inside a “No” symbol — a circle and a diagonal red line through the picture — stifling her singing “Bu di di bi bu bi dibi…” from “How High the Moon.”
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Posted in Back formation, Errors, Music, Spelling | 1 Comment »
August 14, 2013
An assortment of short notes that have come my way recently, on errors, back-formations, penguins, gender roles, and more.
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Posted in Art/lit/music/film, Back formation, Eggcorns, Errors, Gender and sexuality, Malapropisms, My life, Penguins, Spelling, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
July 23, 2013
… was yesterday. From John Lawler on Facebook, this comment about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and an illustration, originally from Richard Galgano:
July 22 is Ratcatcher’s Day (celebrated on June 26 in Hamelin, Germany)
(#1)
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Posted in Back formation, Folklore, Holidays, Poetry, Syntax | 1 Comment »
July 4, 2013
That’s the first half of the main title of a piece in The Week (3/22/13) by Neal Whitman (who gets mentioned on this blog with some regularity). The rest of the title: “26 backformed compound verbs”. The subtitle: “An alphabetical tour of modern verbs that entered the language backwards”. Neal writes:
To get an idea of how productive this compounding-reanalysis-backformation process is, here’s a list of 26 such verbs, one for each letter in the alphabet. Some are older; some are newer; some are here to stay; others probably aren’t. However, in these actual examples from the past two years, they’ve all been used to talk about current topics in business, politics, entertainment, or culture in general.
As I’ve said many times on this blog, I don’t aim to collect all the two-part back-formed verbs in English — that would be a foolish and never-ending task — but I do keep an inventory of examples that come past me (especially when people complain about them), and Neal’s alphabet of examples has 16 that weren’t already on my list.
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June 10, 2013
On AZBlogX yesterday, a set of ten more cattions (male photography — in this case, from Michael Taubenheim, Benno Thoma, and Bel Ami — plus captions from me plus B. Kliban cat stickers); from my third cattion posting:
As in the two earlier collections [here and here], the cattions are variously poetic, funny, slyly queer, and vulgar, often several at once. [The fourth collection is here.]
In the current set, the fifth, this item:
(#1)
The guitar-playing cat is a version of the central figure from my very favorite Kliban cartoon:
(#2)
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Posted in Back formation, Captioning, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Truncation | 1 Comment »
April 16, 2013
… this time fitting into my gay sex postings, about the verb spit-roast. I didn’t see it for a while, because the OED seems to treat the verb as a direct compound, from N spit + V roast: ‘roast on a spit’. But N + V compounds are not particularly common — except as the end result of synthetic compounding followed by back-formation.
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Posted in Back formation, Gender and sexuality, Synthetic compounds | 1 Comment »
