Mixtape vs. Mixed Tape

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Courtney Cullen from Anchorage, Alaska.

How are you guys?

Hi, Courtney.

How are you doing?

So I was calling because I’m having some confusion over the words mixtape and mixed tape. This came up because I thought my son was saying mixtape, like just M-I-X, and that sounded weird to me. And so I asked him, and he said, yes, he’s saying M-I-X. And I’m like, that’s not right. And I’m like, that’s my generation. I know it’s mixtape, and I was telling him how wrong he was, and he looked it up on the Internet and showed me a lot of things that said mixtape. So I was like, wait, what’s going on with this? So I thought I would call and ask you guys.

What generation are you again?

I am a Gen Xer, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s, high school in the 90s.

Gotcha, me too, Gen Xer.

And so for you, a mixtape is what exactly?

So a mixed tape would be you want to get your favorite songs on one tape. So you listen to the radio when I was younger. And then later on, you had your CDs to record. Anyhow, you just get your favorite songs, make a mix of them, and have that tape for yourself or for your crush that you gave it to and feel embarrassment about later. Or when you’re driving around with your friends, you put on your mixtape just to show that you have really good taste. And you want everyone to go, wow, yeah, that’s a great song. And you kind of feel good about yourself, right?

Exactly, yes.

And so your question is whether or not mixtape is one word, two words, hyphenated, something else?

Yeah, or M-I-X is how my son says it.

Oh, or M-I-X-E-D.

And I say M-I-X-E-D is how it is to me. Two words, mixtape.

You might be surprised, Courtney, to find out that it was probably, it looks surely like it was mixtape without the E-D from the start. And the reason we can know this is that there was something called a mix album, that’s without the E-D, before there was a mix tape. And a mix album was something that a band would put together, just like a collection of songs that didn’t really have this overarching theme, where it was just stuff that they really liked that they’d made that didn’t really fit anywhere else into their release schedule. Albums used to really be thematic. This one’s about druids. This one’s about the universe. This one, you know, I was actually thinking of, everyone knows I was thinking about spinal tap.

Another Gen Xer.

Yeah, another Gen Xer.

But there’s another thing that we can look back in the mid 80s and we can look in the written record and see that it was often there as mixed tape. And mixed tape than ED was really rare. Actually, it was far less rare. Even now, the ED form has always been far, the ED form is far, far rarer. It’s just not out there. It’s just not the, it wasn’t the established form ever. The mix without the ED.

And there’s another thing happening here, and this is an overarching theme in English in general, which is the ED does tend, I think this is where you were heading, the ED does tend to drop off of words. There’s something about that unvoiced D, and it happens with unvoiced T’s where you don’t use your vocal cords, where there’s something called lenition, a softening or a quieting of that sound where eventually it can disappear. And there’s a lot of food words where this happens. Corned beef. Sometimes it’s corned beef. Or grilled cheese becomes grilled cheese. Or mashed potatoes becomes mashed potatoes. Or shaved ice becomes shave ice. Or whipped cream becomes a whipped cream.

I only know of one non-food one, Martha.

One non-food one?

Yeah.

Tiled floor becomes tile floor.

I’m sure there are non-food ones, but we like to talk about the food ones.

But mixtape. The way people say it is one word. It sounds like one word. Mixtape. Right? That stress on that first syllable. Mixtape. To me, that says one word. What do you think, Martha?

I agree. And that’s how I would write it, too. M-I-X-T-A-P-E. Mixtape. People don’t say mixtape. They say mixtape.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, if you’re using just the M-I-X, it does look cooler if it’s just one word. Mixtape.

But do you make mixtapes for your son or for your sweeties, the sweeties in your life now?

I make playlists for them. And I’m really happy to say that they appreciate, like, all of the 90s and 80s music that I like. My son has been into that too. He’s 17. And so he’s been playing like Pearl Jam in the car. I was like, whoa, what’s happening here? So for him, this stuff is like, he loves it. And I’m like, okay, I can dig this. This is nice. That’d be like me playing like Elvis in the car when I was his age.

Exactly. My youngest son had a Smith face and both of them love Nirvana. So that makes me very happy.

All right, Courtney, thank you so much for your time. Enjoy your music, and we’ll talk to you again sometime soon, all right?

All right, thank you both. Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Courtney.

Bye-bye.