Bankster

The word bankster, a negative term for (especially big) bankers, has gotten really common since the major bank bailout. (Today, it gets 2.24 million raw google hits.) But it's not THAT established ... OED Online doesn't have it.

It was interesting, I thought, to see the old -ster suffix being productive in the current scene. It used to be highly productive and we still have lots of examples around and not all really old. I had just uncritically reckoned that it was that suffix, with the negative semantics probably by association to terms like huckster, gangster, shyster, and so on.

But in UrbanDictionary and other sources, it's treated as a blend of banker and gangster. Not sure I buy that. Anybody got any info or arguments on this?

The best history of the word I've seen so far is Nancy Friedman's discussion here (with reference to other stuff), but she doesn't probe the etymological angle particularly. She talks about it being used from fringe right people, but today it's widespread in progressive circles, definitely (but maybe also used by the far right still?) And while you're at it, check out the Culturomics data on this word (and compare it to gangster, etc.). It's never been really common, but it's older than you might think and had a big bump during the Depression:

The sharp rise might be consistent with it being coined in the media or something. Appropriate that it's come back now, eh?

Anyway, I'd be curious if others know more about this one.

OK, now I'm on the WOTY thing

See here. NPR interviewed Ben Zimmer on the best Word of the Year candidates.

OK, I guess you might want a word for that ... vagazzle

As I was laughing at Doonesbury's latest on Palin (here — though that's just the general link, not the January 17 strip), I saw this "Say What?" note:

"I have a whole chapter in there on how women should vagazzle their vajayjays."

-- Jennifer Love Hewitt, on her new dating book

If you want to see the video, it's here. If you want to be reassured that Urban Dictionary is all over this topic, it's here. If you want to understand what this means culturally, I have no clue.

"The inflection is near?"

The NYT this morning has an op-ed by Thomas Friedman with the above title. Finally, a major question in the Times that I can answer confidently:

Nearer than clitics but not as near as derivational affixes.

OK, Friedman's not thinking about how complex word forms and longer strings of speech are put together. But what exactly does the headline mean?

As illustrated (image from here), I'm guessing it must be about a point of inflection, as defined here from the Oxford Dictionary of Economics (just an excerpt):

point of inflection A point where a function changes its curvature. This means that its second derivative changes sign. For example, consider the function y  =  ax ³  +  bx , for which dy/dx  = 3 ax ²  +  b and d ² y / dx ²  = 6 ax . ...

In this kind of journalist setting, it's got to be a much more informal meaning, maybe more or less 'turning point'. So, it would be playing on "the end is near". That seems like a long and pretty tortured path for some headline writer to have hacked through.

What am I missing here?