This week, it's the language of politics. Martha and Grant discuss two handy terms describing politicians: far center and snollygoster. Also, a presidential word puzzle, false friends, spendthrifts, and a long list of 17th-century insults. So listen up, all you flouting milksops, blockish grutnols, and slubberdegullions!
This episode first broadcast February 20, 2010. Listen here:
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Grant explains the meaning of the new slang term "far center," and Martha tries to revive an antiquated term meaning "a corrupt politician," snollygoster.
Careful about how you spend your money? Then you're said to be "thrifty." So why is someone who isn't frugal called a spendthrift?
Pommy is an often derogatory nickname used by Australians for the English. Does it come from an acronym for either "Prisoner of Mother England" or "Prisoner of Her Majesty"? The more likely story has to do with sunburn and pomegranates.
An older woman with a knack for finding older men to date? That's what you call someone with excellent graydar.
Speaking of politics, Quiz Guy Greg Pliska presents a puzzle featuring the names of U.S. presidents.
Beware of false friends, those words that don't translate the way you'd expect. For example, the word "gift" in German means "poison," and the Spanish word "tuna" means "the fruit of the prickly pear cactus." These tricky lookalikes are also called faux amis.
A North Carolina woman says when she told her friend she had a TL for her, the friend had no idea what she was talking about. She learns that the term is a shortened form of a secondhand compliment also known as a trade-last or last-go-trade.
Is the term "refer back" redundant?
Martha reports that listeners have been trying to help a caller remember a word for "someone who's exceptionally good at packing things in a confined space." She thinks she's found a winner: stevedore.
To keep something at bay means to maintain a safe distance from it. But does this expression derive from an old practice of using bay leaves to ward off pestilence?
A Tallahassee caller wonders about the name for terms that are capitalized in the middle, like MasterCard and FedEx. Grant explains that they're commonly called CamelCase, not to be confused with Studly Caps.
Grant shares some slang he's found while exploring the game of Skee-Ball, including to hit the hundo.
The hosts and a listener in Grand Rapids, Michigan, trade some 17th-century insults. For more, check out these references: Gargantua and George Albert Nicholson's English Words With Native Roots And With Greek, Latin, Or Romance Suffixes.
Graydar, huh?
You mentioned that it's a word formed by taking the '-DAR' off of 'RADAR' and is generally used to connote finding anything. Gaydar, graydar…would Darth Va-DAR find evil overlords? But I digress.
What is the term for doing that? The word RADAR is an acronym, and the '-DAR' "suffix" doesn't MEAN anything, but people split it off and use it AS a suffix to mean something anyway.
Same thing with '-palooza' and '-rama.' So I can have a Feedback-a-Palooza on a podcast where they devote one episode out of every few just to deal with feedback from listeners. Or a Geek-o-Rama which is where a LOT of geeks gather together at one time. (I'm not sure where the '-rama' came from, but I'm pretty sure 'lollapalooza' is where we get the '-palooza' one.)
Or "marathon" which was originally a place name, and they've now taken the '-thon' off the end and use it to mean anything that goes on for a long time. Sale-A-Thon, read-a-thon, telethon, movie-thon. (Talk about going on for a long time!)
Or how about '-teria.' From the online etymology dictionary, I learned that '-teria' originally meant "a place where work is done," but that after it got spliced with 'cafe' into 'cafeteria,' the suffix '-teria' now means more along the lines of 'serve yourself' or where there is an implication of a large number of selections. For instance, I've heard my friends refer to the liquor store as a "booze-a-teria."
And finally, the '-holic' was ripped unceremoniously off the end of 'alcoholic' and now is used to mean 'addicted to,' even though the 'hol' part was just the end of the word 'alcohol' and the 'ic' was an adjectivizing (is that a word?) suffix. Chocoholic, sexaholic, carbaholic, and sleepaholic are all words I've heard that use it.
So…what do we CALL this…thing? Where you separate part of a word that isn't a suffix and turn it into one? IS there a word for this?
I can't answer your question yet, but I also have a few more favorite members of the set to add:
-copter, which is much less prolific than some, but has always tickled me. e.g. gyrocopter
-burger, which is much more prolific than it deserves.
[edit: added the following]
It seems this phenomenon is called "Morphological Reanalysis," which refers to the effect that the morphology is understood differently from the original morphology, and the word parts take on new meanings, allowing them to be used productively in new word formation.
"Morphological reanalysis." That's much less interesting than I was hoping. 🙂 I was hoping there'd be a '-nym' word. 🙂
Morphonyms? Morphonisms? Morphoreanalitilogisms? I only got the term for the process. I will keep hunting for a term for the resulting words.