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Archive for the ‘Synthetic compounds’ Category

buck-rake

April 7, 2013

From Maureen Dowd’s NYT op-ed column (“Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery?”) today:

She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But instead she’s a tornado of activity, speaking at global women’s conferences in D.C. and New York; starting to buck-rake on the speaking circuit; putting out a video flipping her position to support gay marriage; and signing a lucrative deal for a memoir on world affairs — all as PACs spring up around her, Bill Clinton and Carville begin to foment, and Chelsea lands on the cover of this week’s Parade, talking about how “unapologetically and unabashedly” biased she is about her mother’s future.

I was stopped short for a while by buck-rake, but then I figured it out: buck-raking is attested, so buck-rake could be a back-formation from it; and muckrake / muckraking is probably involved, so there’s likely to be a portmanteau with buck ‘dollar’ in there.

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Posted in Back formation, Portmanteaus, Synthetic compounds | 1 Comment »

Annals of back-formation

March 3, 2013

From Jon Lighter on ADS-L, this report:

CNN tells of a hockey player who “loves to hard-hit.”

That’s a back-formation from the expressions hard-hitting and/or hard-hitter — synthetic compounds of a type I don’t think I’ve written about here (with an adverb incorporated into the compound, rather than a noun, as is usually the case).

I haven’t found the CNN quotation on-line, and searches for other examples of a verb hard-hit run up against the use of hard-hit as a modifier (with PSP hit), as in

Wintry storm brings new woe to hard-hit Northeast (link)

Can Hard-Hit States Reinvent Themselves? (link)

Posted in Back formation, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Noun incorporation in Gayland

December 10, 2012

For some time now, I’ve been analyzing gay male porn flicks from several points of view: the construction of various gay identities, genre conventions, and so on. Every so often, points of linguistic interest turn up in the flicks; well, they are, after all, sources of data like any other, and I’m giving them very close attention, so I pick up things I might have missed in other data. A recent find, in a long-running analysis of Jeff Stryker flicks — on b/t (roughly, bottom/top relations between men), the Total Top role, functions of mess in depictions of (fantasy) gay sex, the organization of sex talk, etc. — is a striking bit of syntax from the Falcon Studios description of Stryker’s first movie, Bigger Than Life:

Jeff Quinn watches superstar Jeff Stryker showing his rock star charisma as he struts his stuff on stage with his big-haired band. And like his song says, he’s “Bigger Than Life!” The infatuated fan waits like a stagedoor Johnny hoping to realize his dream of meeting his hero, and better yet, getting starfucked by Stryker’s monster cock.

The datum is: get starfucked by Stryker’s monster cock. Could have been just fucked, but the writer went for the more colorful starfucked instead.

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Posted in Argument structure, Back formation, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Synthetic compounds, Use and mention | 3 Comments »

Pre-op days

November 11, 2012

Notes on my Friday and Saturday, doing things, with the help of Elizabeth Traugott, to get ready for surgery on Wednesday. Friday afternoon at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (family practice and physical therapy), Saturday morning at the Stanford University Medical Center and the Footwear Etc. store in Palo Alto. (Otherwise, a lot of exhausted sleep.) With some linguistic observations along the way.

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Posted in Derivation, Initialisms, Language in advertising, Language of clothing, My life, Names, Nouning, Synthetic compounds, Technical and ordinary language | 3 Comments »

A batch of back-formations

November 4, 2012

Three two-part back-formed verbs of interest came past me recently: an old acquaintance, to executive-produce ‘act as executive producer for’ [in film, tv, recordings, etc.]; to open carry ‘(lawfully) openly carry (firearms), (lawfully) carry (firearms) in the open’; and to way-find ‘to find one’s way (using some scheme or device)’.

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Posted in Back formation, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, Synthetic compounds | 2 Comments »

Brief mention: invidious incorporations 8/30/12

August 30, 2012

From the 8/25/12 Economist, “Touchable after all”, p. 32:

The arrest shocked the country and foreign investors. [Vietnamese banking tycoon Nguyen Duc] Kien was one of the Bentley-driving, abalone-munching moguls though untouchable because of the wealth, power and connections they amassed as the ruling Communist Party followed China’s lead in opening up the economy.

Bentley-driving and abalone-munching: two synthetic compounds incorporating an object into a V in its PRP (or -ing) form, the whole used here invidiously to characterize someone’s social habits, especially what they eat and drink — a morphological construction (with its sociocultural concomitants) featured notably in the title of Geoff Nunberg’s 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.

(I sometimes think of this as “Nunberg incorporation”.)

Posted in Language and politics, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

sleepwalking

August 27, 2012

Heard on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, in a segment on sleepwalking: 14-year-old Miranda Kelly reporting a moment when she realized, “Oh, I sleptwalked.”

That’s double inflection, on both parts of the verb sleepwalk, where the standard form (sleepwalked) has inflection only on the second part, the head V walk.

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Posted in Back formation, Inflection, Morphology, Synthetic compounds | 8 Comments »

More tone without the words

April 1, 2012

The NYT continues its program of taboo avoidance by indirection — see “The tone but not the words”, here — this time in Margalit Fox’s obituary for writer Harry Crews:

To critics who taxed him with sensationalism, Mr. Crews — a plainspoken ex-Marine, ex-boxer, ex-bouncer and ex-barker — replied, in effect, that it took decadence to lampoon decadence. His actual replies are largely unprintable.

In effect is especially nice; largely unprintable strikes me as unnecessary, especially given plainspoken.

As a bonus: Crews’s

novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, snake-oil-selling characters whose physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them somehow entirely normal and eminently sympathetic

I wonder if there’s a name for the piling up of synthetic compounds in -ing as modifiers, as here, and in the title of Geoff Nunberg’s 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.

(Then there’s the out-X X construction.)

Posted in Derivation, Synthetic compounds, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

monkey grinder

March 4, 2012

(For National Grammar Day, and also Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky’s 8th birthday.)

Mae Sander wrote a little while ago with a piece from the L.A. Times on snake charmers in India, which included this bit (with the crucial coordination boldfaced):

India had about 800,000 unlicensed snake charmers in 2007, according to a recent survey by the Snake Charmers Federation of India. Those now caught without a license face up to seven years in jail under Indian laws that aim to safeguard biodiversity by banning the possession, sale or trading of wild animals. Among the most affected, other than smugglers, have been traditional showmen: charmers, monkey grinders and trick-bear keepers.

Sander balked at monkey grinder instead of organ grinder ‘operator of a street organ (a.k.a. barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy)’. She suspected that the variant was an error induced by the fact that an organ grinders is often accompanied by a monkey. In any case, monkey grinder makes for an imperfect parallelism in the coordination in one sense (while improving parallelism in another).

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Posted in Compounds, Coordination, Errors, Synthetic compounds | 1 Comment »