Thursday, August 21, 2008

Nouning? You want nouning?

I got your nouning right here, bud. On South Park last night — it's a re-run — the kids were taking care of (decorated) eggs as part of a (bizarre) school project. We get this word:
Egg take-carer-of-er
For a chunk of the episode, or even the whole thing, see here. I can't get the form to work for me, but ...

6 comments:

GAC said...

Sound's like a fairly child-like "silly" word. Which is odd in context, since the kids in South Park are known for having some rather "adult" speech (in several senses of the word).

Mr. Verb said...

Interesting point ... it struck me too as somehow different from the usual South Park ways of playing with language.

The Ridger, FCD said...

That's not really "nouning" though. It's just derivation, being done with productive suffixes. (It's being done badly, but that's a different topic.) "Nouning" would be just using the plain verb (or adjective, or phrase) as a noun. Just as it's not "verbing" to say "embiggen" - it's "I like to verb nouns" not "I like to verbify nouns".

Mr. Verb said...

Yeah, you're right: nouning and verbing work better for zero derivation. But I didn't a hook for the word. Any port in a storm.

Anonymous said...

I think we do this occasionally... a picker-upper, for example. And it reminds me of something that a student once asked me about, which was "fucked-up-ed-ness" with an extra "-ed" on it. I think there's some metrical reason but that's as far as I can get. I bet one of the guys (that's non-gender-specific) over at the Log have thought about these...

TootsNYC said...

I love those sorts of coinages.

The more "-ers" you can get in, the more points you score.