Archive for the ‘Derivation’ Category
May 13, 2024
(Playing around with English morphology and male masturbation, so not to everyone’s taste)
It all started with a chance encounter with an ad for Jackery portable power stations, like this one:
(#1)
Given the orientation of my imagination, I was immediately taken to the idea of jackery ‘male masturbation, jacking off’, at places especially devoted to the practice, jackeries (aka jack-off / jerk-off / JO clubs). Clearly not what the Jackery Company had in mind, but where did they get their name?
From the “get to know Jackery” page on the company’s website:
(#2)
Jackery was established in 2012 and co-founded by a former Apple senior engineer and a CEO called Z Sun, a pioneer in the field of Li-battery technology. The original founder developed a battery jacket for the Apple iPhone, which is where the name Jackery comes from.
… Jackery makes portable power stations, solar panels, solar generators, and accessories for the outdoor and mobile market, but they are best known for their portable power stations.
So Jackery has the derivational suffix –ery (denoting ‘a place where some occupation, trade, or activity is carried on’) attached to an abbreviated form of jacket, referring to one of the company’s first products.
The details of words with the the noun-forming derivational suffix –ery are not at all straightforward, full of oddities of history; it’s not a particularly productive suffix. But there’s enough there that you can play with it.
On to this interesting messiness in some detail, and moving from battery jackets to male masturbation.
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Posted in Derivation, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Morphology, Names, Trade names | 3 Comments »
April 27, 2024
So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:
Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).
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Posted in Derivation, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
April 22, 2024
… many people’s reaction to the cartoon psychiatrist (in my 4/20 posting “Charlie on the couch”) admitting to her patient Charlie the StarKist tunafish:
you’re my first patient with a fear of not being eaten
Well, not an everyday word, but a specialized medical term, a bit of arcana from abnormal psychology.
There are, remarkably, two terms (one using the Latin ‘devour’ stem, one the corresponding Greek ‘eat’ stem) for ‘fear of being eaten’, so from these we can compose terms for ‘fear of not being eaten’.
Here you will object that this is a profoundly silly exercise; surely, such a term would have no utility in the real world. But no, there turns out to be a documented paraphilia centered on a erotic desire to be eaten (in the imagination), and in the world of this kink — very far from a top paraphilia, but a real thing — fear of not being eaten, of not having this desire satisfied, would also be a real thing.
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Posted in Derivation, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
March 3, 2024
In today’s Bizarro, a dog park, with parking meters, where you can park your pooch by the hour:
Surprise! The strip exploits a possible sense of the N+N compound dog park — roughly, ‘an area or building where dogs may be left temporarily, for a fee’, the canine analogue of (largely British) car park ‘an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily; a parking lot or parking garage’ (NOAD) — that you probably had never imagined.
Instead, you expected the everyday sense of dog park, ‘a park for dogs to exercise and play off-leash in a controlled environment under the supervision of their owners’ (Wikipedia) — a Use compound with the general meaning ‘park for dogs (to use)’, but coming with a sociocultural context that in practice conveys something considerably more specific.
Now, more details on everyday dog parks, and Bizarro dog parks too.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Derivation, Language and animals, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
August 15, 2023
Provoked by the Merriam-Webster site‘s “Words We’re Watching: ‘Nibling’: An efficient word for your sibling’s kids”: some reflections on the portmanteauing that gives rise to nibling ‘niece or nephew, sibling’s child’; on “having a word for X in language L”; and on neologism and its discontents.
First, the fun. There’s a book for kids, and there’s a t-shirt for kids, too.
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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Compounds, Derivation, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Naming, Portmanteaus, Trade names | 5 Comments »
February 21, 2023
(about bodies, mostly men’s, and the exposure of parts of those bodies, either by complete absence of an item of clothing, or by the absence of part of such an item; there will be plenty of male buttocks on view, and there will be discussion of men’s bodies, sometimes in street language — so not to everyone’s taste)
About items of clothing or parts of such items that are missing, lacking, absent. (I’ll explain the adjective abessive in a moment; it does some of the work of the English derivational suffix –less or the preposition without, but is of wider applicability.) Two topics in this area are standing preoccupations of this blog: (re: absent items of clothing) male shirtlessness; and (re: absent parts of items of clothing) the assless / bottomless / backless nature of jockstraps.
The actual entry point to this posting came on Facebook on 5/9/19, when John Dorrance asked about the first use of assless chaps and Season Devereux responded ,”Aren’t all chaps assless though?” To which I replied:
Yes indeed. The assless in assless chaps is an appositive, rather than restrictive, modifier — used to remind the hearer that chaps do in fact lack an ass, or to emphasize this fact in context — cf. appositive ‘chaps, which are assless’ vs. restrictive ‘chaps that are assless’, which is pleonastic.
It will take a little while to work up to chaps as abessive clothing: in this case, an item of clothing that lacks one of its parts (they’re assless) — in fact lacks two, since they’re also crotchless (chaps are essentially outerwear leggings of leather, held up by a belt).
Exploring abessive clothing quickly can take us far afield, and I’m not sure at this point how far I’m willing to go, so I’ll just dig in and see what happens. Come walk with me.
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Posted in Case, Clothing, Derivation, Grammatical categories, Inflection, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morphology, Semantics, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
September 20, 2022
(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.)
Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and to an alternative name for a classic American novel (by J.D. Salinger) — both names being exocentric V + N compound nouns, the first in English, the second in French. (I’ll call them exoVerNs for short.)
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, Compounds, Derivation, French, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language in politics, My life, Synthetic compounds, Taboo language and slurs, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »
August 3, 2022
The killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by a targeted U.S. drone strike (taking him down as he stood on a balcony) over the weekend in Afghanistan was described by an MSNBC commentator yesterday morning as
a stiletto strike: with the N1 + N2 compound N stiletto strike ‘sudden (military) attack resembling a stiletto (in being very narrowly focused lethal weaponry)’; the sense of the N2 strike here is NOAD‘s 2 [a] a sudden attack, typically a military one
Possibly it was stiletto airstrike; it went by very fast, I haven’t seen another broadcast of it, and it’s not yet available on-line, so I can’t check — but I am sure of the N stiletto and the N strike and the intent of the commentator to commend the pinpoint accuracy of the operation.
It seems that the metaphor has been used occasionally in military circles for some years, but very rarely outside these circles, so that it came with the vividness of a fresh, rather than conventional, metaphor — but while it worked well for me (evoking the slim, pointed, lethal daggers of assassins), it might not have been so effective with others, whose mental image of a stiletto is the heel of a fashionable women’s shoe (slim and pointed, but alluring rather than lethal).
Yes, the two senses (plus a few others that I won’t discuss here) are historically related, with the dagger sense the older and, in a series of steps, the source of the shoe sense. But of course ordinary speakers don’t know that, nor should they be expected to (such information is the province of specialists, historical linguists and lexicographers); what they know is how stiletto is used in their social world, and that’s likely to involve trendy footwear rather than medieval weaponry.
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Posted in Beheading, Beheading, Clothing, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morphology, Semantics of compounds, Shoes, Truncation, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
July 31, 2022
On this blog, a Bob Richmond comment on my 7/29 posting “Many a pickle packs a pucker”, with an old dirty joke that turns on the line “I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer” — with Bob noting, “I’m sure Arnold can provide an appropriate grammatical analysis”. The hinge of the joke is a pun on pickle slicer, which is ambiguous between ‘a device for slicing pickles’ and ‘someone who slices pickles (esp. as a job)’. You don’t need a syntactician to tell you that, but what I can tell you is that this isn’t some isolated fact about the expression pickle slicer, but is part of a much larger pattern that a linguist like me can bring to explicit awareness for you, so that you can appreciate something of the system of English that you (in some sense) know, but only tacitly, implicitly.
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Posted in Alliteration, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Jokes, Language play, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Syntax, Synthetic compounds | 9 Comments »
April 4, 2022
Today’s morning name, the C[ount] noun non-profit, as in this real-life example (lifted from this very blog):
Partners of the Common Cents Lab are tech companies, banks, credit unions, non-profits, and government organizations
And in this NOAD entry:
adj. nonprofit [AZ: very frequently non-profit]: [attributive] not making or conducted primarily to make a profit: charities and other nonprofit organizations. noun mainly North American a nonprofit organization: I spent the next six years working for small nonprofits.
(With clearly C noun occurrences boldfaced)
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Posted in Beheading, Derivation, Language and medicine, Morning names, Morphology, My life | 1 Comment »
