Today’s Bizarro, with the suggestive word screwage:
It turns out that screwage is attested in at least three senses, involving differet bases screw and different uses of the derivational suffix -age.
Archive for the ‘Derivation’ Category
screwage
October 10, 2013Sunday Book Review language and sex
October 9, 2013Two items from the NYT Sunday Book Review (the sex issue): the etymology of buddy and the grammaticality of zipless.
Playing with French morphology
September 15, 2013From Benita Bendon Campbell, this reminiscence of a moment during her time in Paris with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, many years ago:
Ann and I and aother friend were having afternoon tea at our local café on the Boulevard Saint Germain. The patron and patronne had just acquired a German shepherd puppy named Rita. In French, a German shephejrd is “un berger allemand.” Our friend remarked that Rita must be “une bergère allemande” — or a Gereman shepherdess. That is funny in French as well as in English. (The correct form is “une femelle berger allemand.” The name of the breed is invariable.)
Bonnie’s sketch of une bergère allemande:
Breaking up is hard to do
August 25, 2013Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:
Rat is characteristically insulting; never hire Rat for a delicate task.
Then there’s the agentive noun breaker upper (or breaker-upper), with double marking: -er on both the verb, break, and the particle, up.
Odds and ends 8/18/13
August 18, 2013An assortment of short items on various topics, beginning with three from the July 22nd New Yorker. Portmanteaus, New Jerseyization, oology, dago, killer whale, and Gail Collins on Bob Filner.
-less and -ness
August 14, 2013Back on July 11th, I posted this:
Unlike my other postings this morning, shirtless men will not come into it. That is, this posting is shirtlessnessless.
Yes, shirtlessnessless. The formal pattern here is indefinitely extendable, but rapidly yields words of vanishing utility in real life.
Wednesday puns
July 31, 2013Two of today’s cartoons: a Dilbert and a Pearls Before Swine, both with elaborate puns:
(#1)
This turns on the verb weasel, plus the legal phrase (beyond a) reasonable doubt (plus the derivation of adjectives in –able from verbs).
(#2)
And this one turns on the noun and verb hex, plus the food compound Tex-Mex.
In each case, “getting” the comic requires two pieces of information, from different spheres. (And both beyond weaselable doubt and Hex Mex could be viewed either as elaborate imperfect puns or as complex portmanteaus: weaselable + beyond reasonable doubt, hex + Tex-Mex.)
exoneree
June 19, 2013From the NYT‘s Opinion pages on Sunday the 16th, “A Song for the Exonerated” by Francis X. Clines:
Having lost 16 years in prison on a wrongful conviction for rape and murder, Jeffrey Deskovic opted for the simple exuberance of karaoke to celebrate the master’s degree he earned late last month from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I enjoyed singing ‘Live to Tell,’ ” he says of his graduation visit to a loud and friendly bar.
“Too many things, not enough time,” says Mr. Deskovic, an unusual 39-year-old member in the growing category of “exonerees” — a word he loves — who have lived to tell their tales of bungled evidence, forced confessions and the deus ex machina of DNA. He eventually won millions in damages after Westchester police and prosecutors were officially excoriated for a “tunnel vision” investigation that mismanaged exculpatory evidence.
The word is exoneree — not in the OED, NOAD3 or AHD5, but very much in the news in the U.S. thanks to the Innocence Project and similar efforts at exoneration via DNA.
Cullum on morphology
June 11, 2013From Larry Horn (through some intermediaries), two cartoons by the great gag cartoonist Leo Cullum on the theme of English morphology:
Religious double pun
June 8, 2013An Andy Singer No Exit cartoon, accompanying Anthony Gottlieb’s review of Ruth R. Wisse, No More: Making Jewish Humor, NYT Book Review 6/2/13, pp. 38-9:
Two parallel puns, on practicing and on observant.