The curious case of -pilled

A correspondent asks whether –pilled is a libfix. I note grillpilled (when you stop caring about politics and focus on cooking meat outdoors) and catpilled (when you get toxoplasmosis). While writing this, I was wondering whether anyone has declared themselves tennispilled; yes, someone has.

The etymology of -pilled seems clear enough. The phrase taking the {blue, red} pill from that scene in The Matrix (1998) gave rise to the idiomatic compounds blue pill and red pill. These then underwent zero derivation, giving us bluepilled and (especially) redpilled. The most common syntactic function for these two words seems to be as a sort of perfective adjective, possibly with an agentive by-phrase (e.g., “I was redpilled by Donald Trump Jr.’s IG”), but I also recognize a construction where the agent has been promoted to subject position and the object is the benefactor (e.g., “Donald Trump Jr.’s IG redpilled me”).

The thing though, is that –pilled derives from two idiomatic compounds and still has the form of an English past participle. There is no clear evidence of recutting, just a new reading for the zero-derived pill plus the past participle marker –ed. It is thus much like other non-exactly-libfixes like –core (< hardcore) and –gate (< Watergate), in my estimation.

On the not-exactly-libfixes

In an early post I noted the existence of libfix-like elements where the newly liberated affix mirrors existing—though possibly semantically opaque—morphological boundaries. The example I gave was that of -giving, as in Spanksgiving and Friendsgiving. Clearly, this comes from Thanksgiving, which is etymologically (if not also synchronically) a compound of the plural noun Thanks and the gerund/progressive giving. It seems some morphological innovation has occurred because this gives rise to new coinages and the semantics of -giving is more circumscribed than the free stem giving: it necessarily refers to a harvest-time holiday, not merely to “giving”.

At the time I speculated that it was no accident that the morphological boundaries of the new libfix mimic those of the compound. Other examples I have since collected include –mare (< nightmare; e.g., writemare, editmare); –core (< hardcore; e.g., nerdcore, speedcore) and –step (< two-step; e.g., breakstep, dubstep), both of which refer to musical genres (Zimmer & Carson 2012); –gate (< Watergate; e.g., Climategate, Nipplegate, Troopergate) and –stock (< Woodstock; e.g., Madstock, Calstock), extracted from familiar toponyms, and –position (< exposition; e.g., sexposition, craposition), for which the most likely source can be analyzed as a Latinate “level 1” prefix attached to a bound stem. So, what do we think? Are these libfixes too? Does it matter that recutting mirrors the etymological—or even synchronic—segmentation of the source word?

References

B. Zimmer and C. E. Carson. 2012. Among the new words. American Speech 87(3): 350-368.

Libfix report for December 2019

A while ago I acquired a dictionary of English blends (Thurner 1993), and today I went through it looking for candidate libfixes I hadn’t yet recorded. Here are a few I found. From burlesque, we have –lesque, used to form both boylesque and girlesque. The kumquat gives rise to –quat. This is used in two (literal) hybrid fruits: citrangequat and limequat. From melancholy comes –choly, used to build solemncholy ‘a solemn or serious mood’ and the unglossable lemoncholy. From safari there is –fari, used to build seafari, surfari, and even snowfari. Documentary has given rise to –mentary, as in mockumentary and rockumentary.

An interesting case is that of –stache. While stache is a common clipping of mustache, it is commonly used as an affix as well, as in liquid-based beerstache and milkstache and the pejorative fuckstache and fuzzstache.

I also found a number of libfix-like elements that can plausibly be analyzed as affixes rather than cases of “liberation”. Some examples are –eteer (blacketeer, stocketeer), –legger (booklegger, meatlegger), and –logue (duologue, pianologue, travelogue). I do not think these are properly defined as libfixes (they are a bit like -giving) but I could be wrong.

References

D. Thurner (1993). The Portmanteau Dictionary: Blend Words in the English Language, Including Trademarks and Brand Names. MacFarland & Co.

Libfix report for June 2019

You may be familiar with fatberg, a mass of non-biodegradable solids and fats found in sewers, which suggests -berg has been innovated (presumably via iceberg). And now London is also haunted by a concreteberg.

Late great tech unicorn Theranos made use of a proprietary blood-collection device they called the nanotainer (via container), and I recently found out about vacutainer and a security software package called Cryptainer. So -tainer has been liberated.

The other day in Queens I saw a sign for a Mathnasium, presumably extracted from gymnasium, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English also has a token of jamnasium (a space for jam seshes), suggesting a nascent -nasium.

In a recent, widely-derided ad campaign, Applebee’s coined sizzletonin on analogy with the neurotransmitter seratonin and the hormone melatonin, but as far as I know that’s the end of the line for -tonin.

The libfixes -pire, -spire, and -cuck

[CW: distasteful ideologies.]

A student at CUNY, Emily Campbell, recently brought two libfixes to my attention.

The first is -pire, presumably extracted from empire and found in the blend Fempire (an “investment cooperative for FIERCE women”) and in Trumpire, presumably a pejorative meaning something like ‘the world of the Trump family’. Both of these look blend-like in that the base provides a /m/.

In looking for more examples I also discovered a bunch of brand names in -spire, a libfix that appears to have been extracted from inspire. There is Artspire, an art festival, CitySpire, a New York City skyscraper which is more of a dome than a spire (n.), and the tech companies Fundspire, Jobspire, Pinspire, and WeSpire.

A linguistically more interesting example is -cuck. This originates in cuckold, an archaic pejorative referring to the husband of an adulterous woman. How did a (string) prefix become a suffix? Here’s my best guess. First, cuckold obtains a new and more transgressive sense as the name for a genre of pornography in which a (usually white) man is forced to watch as a straight man (usually non-white) has sex with his (usually white) wife or girlfriend. This new racist sense lead to the blend cuckservative, a pejorative for white conservative Western politicians perceived to have betrayed their race (and perhaps also their donor base). While we might expect this would lead to a prefixal reanalysis (and a new libfix *cuck-), what seems to have happened first is cuck was made into a free stem. In informal usage, to cuck (v.) is to embarass, or more specifically emasculate, someone, and a cuck (n.) is someone perceived to be acting against their interests or the interests of their in-group; a class-, race-, or gender-traitor (though a conservative belief system is not necessarily presupposed). It didn’t take long before conservative politicians started using that one on each other. Later, with the fossilization of the incel narrative, we find the suffixal form -cuck as in words like wagecuck ‘wage-slave’ (“whadda schnook!”, I guess), Eurocuck, normcuck, or studycuck, all pejorative (though not necessarily racist).

-cel goes libfix

Oh no, not that story: that’s misognynistic, objectivifying trash. But that narrative, regressive and objectifying as it is, has given us something new and exciting, a new libfix: -cel.

[CW: distasteful ideologies, misogyny, fat-shaming.]

It’s a familiar story, one we all know:

our protagonist, a young white man, can’t find a sexual partner because of feminism, his weak chin, his poor muscle tone…

Oh no, not that story: that’s misognynistic, objectivifying nonsense. But that narrative, regressive as it is, has given us something novel, a new libfix.

The story begins with two closely-related coinages. The first, according to Wikipedia, is the creation of a semi-anonymous Canadian college student who created a blog, “Alana’s Invo to discuss her sexual inactivity. The title: “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”. Involuntary celibacy, in the community that arose, was first shorted to invcel, then incel. (The author, as is happened, ultimately realized she was queer and abandoned the community she’d created.)

In the years since, a community of men gathered on Reddit (and specifically the subreddit “r/incels”), blaming women for their celibacy, and in some cases advocating for sexual violence to recoup their imagined losses. They call themselves incel (n.).

Not all the celibate are aggreviedly so; some have chosen their lot voluntarily, and they, in the jargon of the incel community, are termed volcel (n.). It is not immediately clear that this is a widely-used term of self-identification (though it has its own subreddit, too), and it doesn’t seem to satisfy a lexical need that wasn’t already being served by more-precise, in-community terms like asexual or aromantic. But, it does pair nicely with incel, and it’s fun to apply this plunky neologism to the private lives of historical asexuals like Virgil, James Buchanan, or H. P. Lovecraft.

So far, what we’ve seen looks like a standard type of word formation: clipping or (i.e., truncation) of both parts of a compound expression, which are then joined together to form a single word. In this case, the first syllable [1] of the both words is perserved. This is not particularly novel: consider Amex (< American Express) or op-ed (< opinion editorial).

But as is often the case, the clipping in incel and volcel appears to have spawned a libfix, an affix-like formative extracted from the compound. Witness the recently coined heightcel, an involuntarily celibate short person, presumably one whose involuntarily celibacy can be attributed to their diminuitive stature. Here, -cel attaches not to a clipping like in- or vol-, but to a free stem, the noun height. Libfixation, at least as it should be defined, has begun.

There are many more. (I’m not linking to any “manosphere” sources.) A marcel is an married incel; a baldcel is a bald(ing) incel; a currycel is an incel of South Asian descent; a ricecel is an incel of East- or Southeast Asian descent; a gingercel is a red-headed incel; and so on. There’s (ugh) fatcel, though there’s debate (in the incel community, at least) whether that’s more incel or volcel. And there’s even ironycel, someone (non-celibate, I suppose) who mocks incels.

Some of these -cel types foreground features that seem totally orthogonal to the sexual marketplace, suggesting some sort of gallows humor for outsiders, and for the mods: are we really to believe that some young man, somewhere, thinks he’d have a shot with Stacy if his wrists were just a bit thicker? But yet they keep coming.

[1] In volcel, it’s technically the first syllable plus the onset of the following unstressed syllable: [vɑl] < [vɑ.lənˌtɛ.ɹi].

[Some of my prior coverage of libfixation: Defining libfixes • Your libfix and blend report for May 2016 • Your libfix and blend report for February 2018]

[Thanks to Twitter folks for some minor corrections.]

Libfix report for February 2018

While -splain (and -splainer, -splaining) clearly have potential, they hadn’t, as far as I could tell, gotten much beyond mansplain and occasionally, womansplain. But I changed my mind once I saw a podcast episode entitled “Orbsplainer“, about, well, the orb, you remember the orb, right? How could you forget the Orb? The Orb forbids it! Anyways, looks like a libfix to me.
Constantine Lignos draws my attention to -tainment, a term which refers to media (particularly video and video games) which entertains in addition while doing something else. The locus classicus is the ’90s term edutainment, which looks much more like a blend than a libfix, as does infotainment, politainment, and psychotainment. But but pornotainment suggests this is on its way to affix liberation.

Libfix report for May 2016

Two bits of creative morphology I’ve been seeing around the city:

Lime-a-rita: This trademark (of Anheuser-Busch InBev) isn’t just a redundant way to refer to a margarita (which has a lime base—a non-lime “margarita” is a barbarism), but rather a “light American lager” blended with additional lime-y-ness. I have to imagine this coinage, albeit rather corporate, was helped along by the existence of the truncation ‘rita, occasionally used in casual conversation by their most comitted devotees.
-otto: I first came aware of this through pastotto, the suggested name for a dish of pasta (perhaps penne), fried in olive oil and butter and then cooked in stock, like risotto; according to popularizer Mark Bittman, this is an old trick. Now, that one looks a bit blend-y, given that the ris- part of risotto is really a reference to arborio rice, and that the final -a in the base pasta appears to be lost in the combination. But not so much for barleyotto, which satisfies even the most stringent criteria for libfix-hood.

Defining libfixes

A recent late-night discussion with two fellow philologists revealed some interesting problems in defining libfixes. Arnold Zwicky coined this term to describe affix-like formatives such as -(a)thon (from marathon; e.g., saleathon) or -(o)holic (from alcoholic, e.g., chocoholic) that appear to have been extracted (“liberated”) from another word. These are then affixed to free stems, and the resulting form often conveys a sense of either jocularity or pejoration. The extraction of libfixes is a special case of what historical linguists call “recutting”, and like recutting in general, the ontogenesis of libfixation is largely mysterious.

As the evening’s discussion showed, it is not trivial to distinguish libfixation from similar derivational processes. What follows are a few examples of interesting derivational processes which in my opinion should not be identified with libfixation.

Blending is not libfixation

One superficially similar process is “blending”, in which new forms are derived by combining identifiable subparts of two simplex words. The resulting forms are sometimes called “portmanteaux” (sg. “portmanteau”), a term of art with its own interesting history. Two canonical blends are br-unch and sm-og, derived from the unholy union of breakfast and lunch, and smoke and fog, respectively. These two are particularly memorable—yet unobstrustive—thanks to a clever indexical trick: both word and referent are mongrel-like in their own ways. What exactly distinguishes blending from libfixation? I see two features which distinguish the two word-formation processes.

The first is productivity: libfixation has some degree of productivity whereas blending does not. In no other derivative can one find the “pieces” (I am using the term pretheoretically) of smog, namely sm- and -og. In contrast, there are over a dozen novel -omicses and dozens of -gates. There is therefore no reason to posit that either sm- or -og has been reconceptualized as an affix.

The second feature which distinguishes blending and libfixation deals with the way the pieces are spelled out. Libfixes are affixes and do not normally modify the freestanding base they attach to. In blends, one form overwrites the other (and vis versa). Were -og a newly liberated suffix, we would expect *smoke-og. This criterion also suggests that mansplain, poptimism, and snowquester are not in fact instances of libfixation; in each case, material from the “base” (I also use this term pretheoretically) is deleted.

Zwicky himself has noted the existence of a blend-libfix cline, and the tendency of blends to become libfixes. He suggests the following natural history:

A portmanteau word (useful or playful or both) invites other portmanteaus sharing an element (usually the second), and then these drift from the phonology and semantics of the original to such an extent that the shared element takes on a life of its own — is “liberated” as an affix.

Clipping is not libfixation

“Clipping” (or “truncation”) is a process which reduces a word to one of its parts. Sometimes truncated forms are themselves used for compound formation. For instance, burger is derived from Hamburger ‘resident of Hamburg’ (the semantic connection is a mystery). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, forms like cheese-burger appear in the historical record at about the same time as burger itself. There is one way that clipping is distinct from libfixation, however. Clippings are free forms (i.e., prosodic words), whereas libfixes need not be. In particular, whereas some libfixes have homophonous free forms (e.g., -gate, -core), these are semantically distinct: whereas one can claim to love burgers, one cannot reasonably claim that the current administration has fallen prey to many gates.

The curious case of -giving

To conclude, consider a new set of words in -giving, including Friendsgiving, Fauxgiving, and Spanksgiving. These are not blends according to the criteria above, and while giving is a free form, the bound form has different semantics (something like ‘holiday gathering’). But is -giving a libfix? I’d say that it depends on whether Thanksgiving, etymologically an noun-gerund compound, is synchronically analyzed as such. If so, -giving has not so much been extracted as reanalyzed as a noun-forming suffix, a curious development but not an event of affix liberation.

h/t: Stacy Dickerman, John Kelly