Editor's Corner

Good morning, everyone! I know this isn’t the right day for Editor’s Corner, but it’s been a busy week. Busy enough that I’m going to give you material that I didn’t write, but I grabbed from Mental Floss. It’s about creating words in the recent and not-so-recent past. I have selected bits and pieces of the article for you, but you can read the complete list by clicking the preceding link.

Happy Friday!

People love coining new words. And they love making good use of them—for a while anyway. Adultescence and Frankenstorm are just a couple of the creative blends that have once made it big but didn’t really stick around.

Sometimes, however, a coinage is so apt and useful that it does stick. When that happens, we sometimes get more than just one new word; we get a new kind of word ending, one that goes on to a long, productive career in word formation. Bookmobile was born in the 1920s and went on to spawn the likes of bloodmobile, Wienermobile, and pimpmobile. Workaholic is a creation of the 1940s that led to everything from chocoholic to sleepaholic to Tweetaholic. But not all of these creative endings have staying power. We don’t hear much today from the bootlegger-inspired -leggers of the 1940s—the foodleggers, gasleggers, tireleggers, and meatleggers who were circumventing the law to deal in valuable rationed goods.

[KC – Here are a few of the suffixes.]

-athon

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this one was taken from marathon back in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it has proved its staying power since. Whether for a good cause or for no cause at all, our telethons, danceathons, bakeathons, drinkathons, complainathons, and assorted other verbathons have made this past century something of an athonathon.

-splaining

Mansplaining, nerdsplaining, vegansplaining, catsplaining—seems like everybody’s got some ’splaining to do these days.

-tastic

It’s cheesetastic! It’s craft-tastic! It’s awesometastic! Almost anything can be made fantastic with this ending. It can even bring out the unrecognized positive qualities of that which is grosstastic, sadtastic, or craptastic. Beware the -tastic meaning drift, however. Craptastic wavers between “so crappy it’s great” and just “super crappy.”

-licious

Babelicious, bootylicious, funalicious, partylicious, biblicious, yogalicious, mathalicious—if you like it, celebrate it with a -licious!

-pocalypse

Snowpocalypse! Heatpocalypse! Will the world end in firepocalypse or icepocalypse? This suffix seems to have begun in the domain of weather reports, but hysterical exaggeration has proved useful elsewhere. Did you not hear of the e-reader’s bringing of the bookpocalypse?

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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