Friday, September 26, 2008

"Adversleazement"

I'm pretty sure I have only heard and read the term adver-sleaze-ment in the last couple of weeks, and it actually turns up for some direct discussion here. Greg Sargeant says there that he's been using it "for weeks", but doesn't take credit for coining it. It gets basically no hits in a google search.

But I'm trying to think of other cases of blends where we basically infix a word to replace a syllable of the original word. That is, we don't just add a syllable here but we take out an existing one to keep the overall prosody and syllable count.

Surely this isn't new, is it?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Automagically? This seems to fit the bill.

The Ridger, FCD said...

That one's tricky - magically is a word on its own, so it's hard to say if it's auto + magically, or auto- -mat+mag -ically.

Wishydig said...

i wrote a bit on 'malwebolence' a while back.

ever at the fore on these issues, ben zimmer, offered up john algeo's term 'sandwich words' and a link to a LL post from 2006.

he also dropped off 'diworsification'.

Mr. Verb said...

Thanks, especially to Wishydig -- I had forgotten the malwebolence thing, and am not sure I'd read Ben Zimmer's good post before.

Anonymous said...

Manisnowba.

The Ridger, FCD said...

I forgot - at work we refer to our periodic IT changes (you know the ones - you can't do as much, but what you can do you do faster) as "updegrades" does that one work?

Wishydig said...

that looks more like an infix. the 'de' isn't a free morpheme, which i think the meat in these sandwiches tends to be. it's kinda like 'automagically' isn't it?

Alison Cummins said...

Chocaholic/workaholic - or do you need the syllable to be in the middle?