Archive for the ‘Back formation’ Category

Pants-lower

November 9, 2009

Having posted on the back-formed verb shirt-lift a while ago — a verb based on the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in two families of senses) — I had hopes of coming across the corresponding verb pants-lower (with pants either in the mostly U.S. sense ‘trousers’ or in the sense ‘underpants’). Certainly, visual depictions of the act in question are easy to find in some places, and you can find plenty of references to pants-lowering on the web, indeed references to many different kinds of pants-lowering, from hip-hop pants-lowering to ordinary pants-lowering in undressing and the like.

I was particularly interested in pants-lowering as a sexual display, analogous to the “torso display” kind of shirt-lifting. Here’s a relatively modest example from an underwear ad (primarily aimed at a gay male audience — men who can both appreciate the display and identify with the model):

The model is shown on the right performing a first-stage pants-lowering maneuver, the beginning of a strip tease. We don’t see any pubic hair (but maybe he shaves his pubes), and not even the base of his penis.

On linguistic matters: lots of relevant hits for the synthetic compound pants-lowering, but (unsurprisingly) none for the awkward synthetic compound pants-lowerer. And none for back-formed verb to pants-lower, though you can imagine situations where it could be useful. Maybe it will crop up eventually; fresh 2-part back-formed verbs turn up with some regularity.

More sexual back-formations

September 27, 2009

Having stumbled into a discussion of the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in several senses) and the back-formed verb to shirt-lift historically derived from them, I was moved to explore some other possible sexual back-formations. Given cock-sucking and cock-sucker, had people invented a back-formed verb to cock-suck (however spelled)?

The answer is: yes, big time.

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Lifting shirts

September 23, 2009

A little while back I made up some notecards using an ad from 10percent.com (reproduced below), adding the caption:

ABS Show
A few of the guys weren’t
Into shirt-lifting.

The ad shows various degrees of lifting shirts in front, to display the male torso, especially the guy’s “six-packs” (the abs, that is, abdominal muscles). It celebrates fitness, and homoeroticism as well.

Linguistic point here: the synthetic compound shirt-lifting, which turns out to have two families of senses, only one of them illustrated  by the ad. There’s also a synthetic compound shirt-lifter, with two families of senses; the guys in the ad are shirt-lifters in one sense, but not (necessarily) in the other.

And then, of course, from shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter, we get a back-formed compound verb to shirt-lift, again with two families of senses.

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Eve-teasing

September 17, 2009

On the front page of the NYT on September 16, the story “On India’s Railways, Women Find New Peace in the Commute” (by Jim Yardley), about a pilot program introducing commuter trains exclusively for female passengers — “Ladies Specials” in India’s four largest cities. These trains give women respite from public harassment by men, a practice known as eve-teasing (also spelled Eve-teasing or eve teasing or Eve teasing).

There’s a lot to dislike in the euphemism eve teasing. Teasing is a mild term indeed for aggressive insulting, catcalling, groping, and the like. And the reference to the biblical Eve deflects the offense from the perpetrators by suggesting that the objects of the offense are temptresses. So it’s “just fun”, and anyway, they bring it on themselves — attitudes that the women in question most definitely do not share.

The term originates in Indian English, and the practice is widespread in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It’s generally believed that the incidence of eve-teasing has dramatically increased as women appeared in increasing numbers in universities and in the work force and, generally, as independent actors in public life. And its appearance in movies and music videos (where it’s often framed as an overture to romance) has probably fostered its spread in real life.

The OED (draft entry of March 2006) has cites for the synthetic compounds eve-teasing and eve-teaser from 1960 (from a single issue of the Times). Many early cites have the words in quotation marks, suggesting that they had only recently come into widespread use.

So the synthetic compounds have been around for some time, and we can wonder if they’ve gone down the path to back-formation, of a verb to eve-tease. The verb is here:

Sanjay said that he passes comments at girls to please them, for Subash it was to get attention from the opposite sex whereas for Manish … it is just fun and it remains fun only when he gets to eve tease from a distance, like when he is on a bus or when he has a group of friends. (link) [from Nepal]

Me or my brother always had to accompany my sisters to the grocery shops because there was a particular stretch where the guys loitering around would try to eve tease my sisters…. (link) [from India]

Rawalpindi cops enjoy watching women being eve-teased (link) [from Bangladesh]

Girl commits suicide after being eve teased (link) [from India]

to name-check

July 11, 2009

Following up on my shout-out posting, here’s another innovative formation, formally very different from N + Prt composites, but with some overlap in meaning: the two-part back-formed verb to name-check.

It started with e-mail from a correspondent whose name I mentioned in a posting:

… it’s an honor to be name-checked by you.

This is a back-formation from a compound noun name-checking (parallel to name-drop back-formed from the compound name-dropping ‘dropping names’), in the sense ‘mention someone less famous than you’ — so being name-checked (in my correspondent’s usage) is being mentioned by someone more famous than you.  In this usage, it’s the social inverse of name-drop (and name-checking is the social inverse of name-dropping).

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To church marry, to civil marry

July 5, 2009

Tom Suozzi’s op-ed column “Why I Now Support Gay Marriage” a while back (NYT, 6/13/09) made me think some more about 2-p b-f verbs (two-part back-formed verbs), and in particular the possible 2-p b-f verbs to church marry and to civil marry.

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peeve vocabulary

June 15, 2009

My last posting here was about peeveblogging and related phenomena. Then I began wondering about the history of peeve words. The OED did a draft revision of its entries on these verbs in December 2005, so I can report on much of this history here.

It seems to begin with peevish, of uncertain origin and with a range of senses, attested from ca. 1400. Peevishness followed not long after (attested from 1468 on). There’s then a long hiatus, until the early 20th century, when peeve words exploded: a verb peeve, back-formed from peevish, attested as a transitive from 1901, as an intransitive from 1912; then an adjective peeved (from 1908); and a noun peeve, as in pet peeve (from 1909).

Things were quiet until blogging came along, and with it the synthetic compounds peeveblogging and peeveblogger (the first, apparently, on Language Log in October 2005), along with the ordinary noun-noun compound peeve blog ‘blog for/of peeves’ and the (I suppose) inevitable back-formed verb peeveblog, as in this blog entry from 2008:

This will be the last time that I peeveblog about peeveblogging about peeves.

Postings on 2-p b-f verbs

June 13, 2009

Back-formations come in several flavors. Recently I’ve been posting on two-part back-formed (2-p b-f) verbs; a list of these postings is given below, for your reference. But there are also:

simple back-formed verbs (like incent);

nouns back-formed from nouns in -s, with the -s interpreted, ahistorically, as the mark of the plural (kudo);

other back-formed nouns (taxon, from taxonomy);

adjectives back-formed from negative adjectives by eliminating a negative prefix (couth);

other back-formed adjectives (gullible).

Back-formed verbs are hugely more numerous than the other types.

The list:

AZ, 8/22/08: To gay marry:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=519

AZ, 11/2/08: Early/absentee vote (the verbs):
 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=795

AZ, 4/5/09: scuba dove?:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1296

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/08/child-rear/

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/08/todays-two-part-back-formed-verb-inventory/

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/09/back-formings/

Please stop

June 12, 2009

In my posting on my inventory of two-part back-formed verbs, I tried to say clearly but politely that I was not proposing to create a complete inventory of the things, but only to give a representative sample of them. This has not stopped people from sending me more examples of this very common phenomenon, with the result that I’ve had an hour a day or so consumed by adding these examples. I’m beginning to feel hunted.

(I do welcome more examples of phenomena that I have few sightings of, but 2-p b-f verbs are not such a case.)

Please stop sending me more cases, even if you love them.

If anyone wants to maintain something like a complete inventory, I’m happy to share my files (not just the verb list, but information about sources and the like). And Ben Zimmer notes that you can find a whole pile of examples (I hate to think how many) by doing an advanced search in the OED on “back-formation”.

Back-formings

June 9, 2009

My recent posting on two-part back-formed verbs has elicited queries about how and why these verbs arise. The first of these questions is easier to answer than the second, but I’ll take a stab at both.

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