A Certain Kind of Person

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dave, and I’m calling from Spillcorn, North Carolina.

So my curiosity about this, this is outside of the neighborhood is where I’ve heard this, goes back several years to where I was sitting in a cafe one time.

And I was by myself, and I was overhearing a conversation at the table next to me, and they were talking about movies, and this woman said, well, I’m a period piece person.

And so, you know, that movie really did it for me, or that really appealed to me.

And at the time, I thought, you know, well, that’s a peculiar expression.

I’m a period piece person.

But then I thought about it more, and I realized that we already, you can hear people say, like, I’m a cat person, he’s a dog person, things like that from before.

What I’m curious to know, first of all, is, like, have you all noticed this, too?

And then also, like, the meaning.

Like, if you say that you’re a mayonnaise person, is that the same as simply saying that you love mayonnaise?

I do this.

I say I’m a whatever person.

I’m a Twizzler person, not a Red Vines person, for example.

I’m a crunchy peanut butter person, not a creamy peanut butter person.

Well, in English, the person is really doing the role of the suffix file, P-H-I-L-E, that Greek suffix, which means lover, or one who loves.

And you have that phile suffix with words that are obviously Greek, like bibliophile and a whole bunch of others.

And where we run into the need for the person use in English is like it’s not easy to say catophile.

That doesn’t make sense.

Or to say bukophile, right?

So what we want to do is probably make our compound out of components that seem to be more English and less obviously foreign like phile.

And so we do that with person.

It kind of fills that same role, making these open compounds, that is, two words together, two nouns together with a space between them, like cat person or spaghetti person or country and western person, that sort of thing.

Those are all some kind of compound.

And if you dig around, you’ll find it goes back at least 100 years.

As a matter of fact, I found a use from 1919 of a woman writing an everyday magazine, I’m sorry, Everybody’s Magazine.

And she talks about the old, ever new cat versus dog controversy.

And she talks about, are you a cat person or are you a dog person?

So that at least has been going for almost 100 years.

Yeah, I was going to say it’s interesting that she framed it as either or.

Because I think you sort of are implying what you’re not as well.

That’s true.

I’m not a dog person, although I’m an animal person, so I’m both of those.

And so, again, we run into this.

So just to kind of recap that, what’s happening here is we’re doing in English what we do with suffixes when words borrowed from other languages.

And it’s just it works really well in English, I think.

Yeah, it’s all the rage, though.

Is it?

Okay.

Well, Dave.

Anyway.

Thank you for the call.

This was very good.

I think we made some inroads on this.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks a lot.

It’s been fun talking about this.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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