Overheard

1. I love formations in -age, which experienced a brief rise in popularity in the 90s and early aughts, but have faded back to normal levels by now.  But I heard a Brewers baseball announcer the other night talking about how a particular hitter was really good against a particular pitcher, and he said, "He's 7 for 9 against this pitcher.  That is ownage."  Yesssss!

2. Rachel Maddow was talking about President Obama and said, "He surged the troops."  Whoa. I googled it and it's actually not that common.  I did find one instance of "it's time to "surge" the troops home" - double whoa - at least those scare quotes indicate that the author knew it was non-standard!

So, what I'd really like is for someone to surge -age again.

Unhand me, wretch!

All it takes to make me happy is a little word formation.  Got my fix yesterday in this:  unbaby.me.  It's very simple: zero-derive the noun 'baby' to a verb and then add un-.  Yet, is the meaning predictable?  Only if we give the verb 'baby' a new sense (kind of like the sense of 'beer' in "Beer me").  With un-, it's just reversative of that new sense, if you know what the app does.  Hint: go to the website and just run your mouse over the pictures of the adorable little babies.

"Nouns that sound like verbs": Dongle

Astute question asked today about the now-common word dongle:*

What's the deal with nouns that sound like verbs?

The connection to dangle seems semantically close, given the nature of the creature named. Maybe there are enough verbs in the lexicon compared to other lexical categories (parts of speech) that we think verb from the sound shape? You don't get good rhymes but with other vowels, there are plenty: Tingle, mingle, wrangle, tangle, etc. versus angle (surely more common in its non-verbal form), single, etc. Check out some patterns for yourself here.

*If you don't know, see here.

Rove on people being 'unreceiving' of George W. Bush

... and Wonkette dumps him in our professional lap:

Gifted Linguist Karl Rove Will Expose “Unreceiving” [Sic] Bush Staffers
Karl Rove’s forthcoming Kunstlerroman, An American Wife, will identify everyone who was “unreceiving” [sic] of Bush’s agenda, thus ensuring that it will the longest book ever published.

I like Wonkette's writing a lot, and this use of linguist is probably part of their shtick; let's hope so.

So, what about that word? I'm guessing he just misspoke, and unreceptive might well have been the target. With something like this, you figure that English is morphologically supple enough and the pieces are common and productive enough that people have created the form time and time, even if it's not a familiar one. And they have. The particular morphological form is attested almost 500 years ago:

1566 in Three 15th Cent. Chron. (Camden) 138 To quyat y^e matter y^e churche dores wer fayn to be closyd, and y^e paryschyns to departe unreseyvynge for that day.

But we have a very different meaning from Rove's. Likewise if you google it, where you get a fair number of hits — it's mostly about the act of undoing the receipt of something you've ordered. You also get stuff about the failure to receive, e.g. a signal, a modern version of the 1566 quote, I suppose. If only we had been truly unreceiving of Bush in these senses!

Image from here.

"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?

Mongerous morphology in the Onion

The Onion has a good piece this week, here, called:

Fearmongers, Warmongers Gather For Annual Mongering Conference

They get hatemongering in there too, of course, and close with a note about "next week's fish- and whoremongering conference in El Paso, TX." There's a good set of in part newer terms (let's not touch where or whether to use a hyphen ), like rumor-mongering, hope-mongering, disease-mongering, word-mongering, etc. Google around a little and you'll find doom-mongering, monger-mongering, and so much more.

But the Onion loves derivational productivity at a deeper level than that:

… fearmonger Gerald Sachs mongered. "Of course, with the current political and social climate, the main question is whether next year will be anywhere near as mongerly."

Go Onion.

Drunkorexia

Few parts of a newspaper interest me less than any section that has "fashion" or "style" in its title, but I didn't flip past this in today's NYT on "compounding" eating disorders with other dangerous behaviors. The opening list contains these disturbing, if not instantly transparent, terms:

Manorexia. Orthorexia. Diabulimia.

If this was a GRE question, I guess you'd say that the second is not like the others morphologically. The initial element of the first item is not from manic (as I first wondered) but rather man — it's male anorexia. The second uses a familiar prefix, and it's a fixation on eating healthy food, according to this description, a disorder unto itself, not directly compounded with anorexia. And the third is about diabetics who avoid insulin because it can cause weight gain but apparently doesn't involve purging. More immediately obvious in meaning is drunkorexia, mentioned in the subtitle and discussed at length in the article.

The blends above all refer to potentially fatal health problems (and we have blends that are negative in meaning — smog, stagflation) but it seems like a lot of blending in English is commercial or playful, like in Lewis Carroll or the celebrity names you can see here. Using blends here not only makes these terms distinctly non-clinical sounding, but it also feels awkward given concerns about glamorizing eating disorders (like here), not to mention that we surely don't want to do anything that sounds like it trivializes them.