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.]

Sweet potato salad

Nerds love posting weird recipes; here’s mine.

Ingredients

Two sweet potatoes, skinned and cubed
1/2th cup balsamic vinegar
1/2th cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup dry farro
A bag of baby kale
(Optional) a handful of fresh blueberries or strawberries
(Optional) chunks of chevre
Salt & pepper to taste

Preparation

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Wrap the cubed sweet potatoes loosely in foil and dress lightly with salt, pepper, and a dash of olive oil. Roast roughly 30 minutes (turning it at least once), until golden brown, and refrigerate.

Cook the farro in a rice cooker according to directions, and refrigerate.

Reduce the balsamic vinegar in a sauce pan over low heat, and set aside.

Wash the baby kale and combine with sweet potatoes, farro, and (optionally) fruit or chevre. Dress with equal parts balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and add salt and pepper to taste.

A Morris Halle memory

Morris Halle passed away earlier today. Morris was an absolute giant in the field of linguistics. His work in the 1950s and 1960s completely revolutionized phonological theory. He did this, primarily, by rejecting an axiom of the previous century’s work.
The theory of phonology was so utterly transformed by his argument against the principle of biuniqueness that the very concept is rarely even taught in the 21st century.
And this was just one of his earliest scientific contributions.

I could say a lot more about Morris’s work, but instead let me tell a short anecdote. In 2010 or so I happened to be in the Boston area and my advisor kindly arranged for me to meet Morris. After getting coffee we walked to his spare shared office. The only thing of note was a single wall-mounted bookshelf containing three books: Morris’ own Sound Pattern of Russian and Sound Pattern of English—with the dust cover removed so as to exhibit the unique bas-relief cover designed by Morris’s wife, a talented visual artist—and of course, Walker’s rhyming dictionary. For whatever reason, we started to discuss Latin. Working with the legal pad, Morris first showed me a novel analysis of thematic vowels. Ignoring a few irregular (“athematic”) stems, all Latin verb stems have a characteristic final vowel: -ā- in the first conjugation, -ē- in the second, a vowel of varying quality (usually e or i) in the third, and -ī- in the fourth. In the first conjugation and most of the third conjugation, this vowel disappears in the first person singular active indicative verb, which is marked with an -ō suffix. Thus for the second conjugation verb docēre ‘teach’, we have doceō ‘I teach’, with the theme vowel preserved, and similarly for the fourth conjugation. In contrast, for the first conjugation verb amāre ‘love’, we have amō ‘I love’, with the theme vowel omitted, and similarly for the majority of the third conjugation. This much I already knew. To me it was just one of those conjugational quirks one has to memorize when learning Latin but Morris suggested that it was not necessarily so. What if, he argued, the first conjugation -ā- was deleted by a following -ō? (Certainly that rule is surface-true, except for a handful of Greek loanwords like chaos.) But what about the third conjugation? Morris suggested that he had long believed the underlying form of the third conjugation theme vowel was [+back], something like /ɨ/, and he proceeded to lay out the necessary allophonic rules, and finally a rule which deletes the first of two [+back] segments! I was floored.

I then showed him an analysis I was working on at the time. Once again ignoring a few irregulars, Latin masculines and feminine nouns of the third declension are characterized by a nominative singular suffix -s. When the verb stem is athematic and ends in a /t, d/, this consonant is deleted in the nominative singular (e.g., frons, frontis ‘forehead’). I argued that this rule ought to be extended to also target /r/ so as to account for the so-called “rhotic” stems like honōs, honōris ‘honor’ (e.g., /honōr-s/ → [honōs]). To make this work, one must write the rule so that it bleeds its own application (see here for the full analysis), and as one of several opaque rules. This is something which is possible in the rule-application framework proposed by Morris and colleagues, but which cannot be straightforwardly implemented in more recent theoretical frameworks. I must have hesitated for a moment as I was talking through this, because Morris grabbed my hand and said to me: “Young man, remember always to speak clearly and to never apologize for your rule ordering.” And then he bid me adieu.

When should we call it “terrorism”?

According to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a recent spate of serial bombings targeting prominent African-Americans in Austin, TX, has “no apparent nexus to terrorism at this time”. I want to make a pedantic lexicographic point about the definition of terrorism (and terrorist) regarding this. There is certainly a sense of terrorism which just involves random lethal violence against civilians, and by that definition this absolutely qualifies. But, that is not the definition used by the state (or mass media). Rather, they favor an alternative sense which emphasizes the way in which the violence undermines the authority of the state. This is in fact encoded in the (deeply evil) PATRIOT Act, which defines terrorism as an attempt to “…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.” Let’s assume, as seems likely though by no means certain, that the bomber(s) are white supremacists targeting African-American communities. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that terrorizing people of color undermines the authority of a deeply racist society and its institutions any more than say, trafficking crack cocaine in African-American communities to support right-wing death squads abroad. Terrorizing people of color is absolutely in line with US domestic and foreign policy, and the language chosen by the White House (and parroted by the media) naturally reflects that.

Making high-quality graphics in R

There are a lot of different ways to make an R graph for TeX; this is my workflow.

In R

I use cairo_pdf to write a graph to disk. This command takes arguments for image size and for font size and face. If you’re on a Mac, you will need to install X11.

Image size

I always specify graph size by hand, in inches. For manuscripts and handouts, I usually set the width to be the printable width. If you’re using 1″ margins, that’s 6.5″. Then, I adjust height until a pleasing form emerges.

Fonts

I match the font face of the manuscript (whatever I’m using) and graph labels by passing the font name as the argument to family. This matters most if you’re writing a handout, and matters less if you’re sending it to, say, Oxford University Press, who will redo your text anyways. I found out the hard way that the family keyword argument is absent in older versions of R, so you may need to upgrade. By default, image font are 12pt. This is generally fine, but can be adjusted with the pointsize argument.

Graphing

This is a no-brainer: use ggplot2.

All together now

cairo_pdf('mygraph.pdf', width=6.5, height=4, family='Times New Roman')
qplot(X, Y, data=dat)
dev.off()

In TeX

Add usepackage{graphicx} to your preamble, if it’s not already there. In the body, includegraphics{mygraph.pdf}.

TeX tips for linguists

I’ve been using TeX to write linguistics papers for nearly a decade now. I still think it’s the best option. Since TeX is a big, complex ecosystem and not at all designed with linguists in mind, I thought it might be helpful to describe the tools and workflow I use to produce my papers, handouts, and abstracts.

Michael Becker‘s notes are recommended as well.

Software

I use xetex (this is the same as xelatex) from XeTeX. It has two advantages over the traditional pdflatex and related tools. First, you can use system fonts via fontspec and mathspec. If you are using Computer Modern or packages like txfonts or times, etc., it’s time to join the modern world.

Secondly, it expects UTF-8. If you are using tipa, or multi-character sequences to enter non-ASCII characters, then you probably have ugly transcriptions. (Don’t want to name names…)

Fonts

Linguists generally demand the following types of characters:

Alphabetic small caps
The complete IPA, especially IPA [g] (which is not English “g”)
“European” extensions to ASCII: enye (año), diaresis (coöperation, über), acute (résumé), grave (à), macron (māl), circumflex (être), haček (očudit), ogonek (Pająk), eth (fracoð), thorn (þæt), eszet (Straße), cedilla (açai), dotted g (ealneġ), and so on, for Roman-like writing systems

The only font I’ve found that has all this is Linux Libertine. It has nothing to do with Linux, per se. In general, it’s pretty handsome, especially when printed small (though the Q is ridiculously large). If you can deal without small caps (and arguably, linguists use them too much), then a recent version of Times New Roman (IPA characters were added recently) also fits the bill. Unfortunately, if you’re on Linux and using the “MS Core Fonts”, that version of Times New Roman doesn’t have the IPA characters.

This is real important: do not allow your mathematical characters to be in Computer Modern if your paper is not in Computer Modern. It sticks out like a sore thumb. What you do is put something like this in the preamble:

\usepackage{mathspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}
\setmathfont(Digits,Greek,Latin){Times New Roman}

Examples

The gb4e package seems to be the best one for syntax-style examples, with morph-by-morph glossing and the like. I myself deal mostly in phonology, so I use the tabular environment wrapped with an example environment of my own creation called simplex.sty and packaged in my own LingTeX (which is a work-in-progress).

Bibliographies

I use natbib. When I have a choice, I usually reach for pwpl.bst, the bibliography style that we use for the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. It’s loosely based on the Linguistic Inquiry style.

Compiling

I use make for compiling. This will be installed on most Linux computers. On Macintoshes, you can get it as part of the Developer Tools package, or with Xcode.

I type make to compile, make bib to refresh the bibliography, and make clean to remove all the temporary files. Here’s what a standard Makefile for paper.tex would look like for me.

 # commands
 PDFTEX=xelatex -halt-on-error
 BIBTEX=bibtex

 # files
 NAME=paper

 all: $(NAME).pdf

 $(NAME).pdf: $(NAME).tex $(NAME).bib *.pdf
      $(PDFTEX) $(NAME).tex
      $(BIBTEX) $(NAME).tex
      $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode -no-pdf $(NAME).tex
      $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode $(NAME).tex

 clean:
      latexmk -c

There are a couple interesting things here. -halt-on-error kills a compile the second it goes bad: why wouldn’t you want to fix the problem right when it’s detected, since it won’t produce a full PDF anyways? Both -interaction=batchmode and -no-pdf shave off a considerable amount of compile time, but aren’t practical when debugging, and when producing a final PDF, respectively. I use latexmk -c, which reads the log files and removes temporary files but preserves the target PDF. For some reason, though, it doesn’t remove .bbl files.

Draft mode

Up until you’re done, start your file like so:

\documentclass[draft,12pt]{article}

This will do two things: “overfull hboxes” will be marked with a black line, so you can rewrite and fix them. Secondly, images won’t be rendered into the PDF, which saves time. It’s very easy to tell who does this and who doesn’t.

On slides and posters

There are several TeX-based tools for making slides and posters. Beamer seems to be very popular for slides, but I find the default settings very ugly (gradients!) and cluttered (navigation buttons on every slide!). I use a very minimal Keynote style (Helvetica Neue, black on white). I’m becoming a bigger fan of handouts, since unlike slides or posters, the lengthy process of making a handout gets me so much closer to publication.