-Vlicious invention
A little while back I
looked
at the Snickers coining substantialiscious,
possibly a portmanteau of
substantial
and
delicious, or an
occurrence of a recent jocular suffix -V
licious (spelled -
alicious, -
elicious, -
ilicious, -
olicious), maybe with a nod to
luscious as well. I offered the
further examples
crunchalicious,
crispalicious, and
yummalicious, and passed on
citations of a 1994 portmanteau
sacrilicious
from "The Simpsons", which some correspondents speculated might have
been the model for the other examples.
Well, we can now toss the Simpsons idea, since there are cites of
babelicious and
blackalicious from 1992, which
seems to have been a particularly morpholicious year. The larger
point is that -V
licious words
are likely to have been invented independently on many occasions, as
portmanteaus, leading eventually to the emergence of the jocular
suffix. Some innovations in language have no clear single moment
of creation, but arise as natural re-workings of the material of a
language, by many different hands.
Babelicious turns up, not in
"The Simpsons", but in another fount of popular culture, the movie
"Wayne's World" (1992). Andrew Whitby supplied
the crucial quote
to me:
[Talking about Claudia Schiffer]
Wayne Campbell: She's a babe.
Garth Algar: She's magically babelicious.
Wayne Campbell: She tested very high on the stroke-ability scale.
Babeolicious (with that
spelling) made it into the
Urban
Dictionary in 2003, with the definition "A person good looking
enough to eat!" Google webhits include references to babeolicious
dresses, hunky guys serving as "babeolicious eye-candy", the
"über-babeolicious Emmy Jo" on the television show "The New Zoo
Revue", the "babeolicious yet dull" Jadzia Dax in "Star Trek: Deep
Space 9", you get the idea: high physical attractiveness.
Babelicious gets the following
Urban
Dictionary entry in 2005, from an enthusiastic Australian guy:
A combination of the words "babe" and
"delicious", where "babe" refers to a very attractive woman, and
"delicious" refers to the fact that you'd be onto her like a lion onto
a prairie dog if she gave you the slightest encouragement. Things that
are babelicious include supermodels, certain singers/actresses (if
you're thinking Britney or Madonna here go and wash your mind out with
soap), any female gymnast/contortionist over the age of 18, and that
chick I walked past on the street on my way into work this morning.
Now,
blackalicious.
Alexandra Zuser pointed me to the
rap
group Blackalicious, formed in that morpholicious year 1992.
Vast number of webhits. It's not so clear that this is a
portmanteau; this might just be -V
licious
conveying a highly positive evaluation. The semantic development
would be from 'extremely good tasting' (of food) to 'physically very
attractive' (delighting senses other than taste) to 'intensely good'.
Some coinings in -V
licious are
pretty clearly portmanteaus: they refer to yummy food and drink (
Eat'elicious, a London restaurant;
sip-elicious; and
bub'olicious, with reference to
champagne, that is, to "bubbly"), and some of them also have first
parts ending in
d, which can
then overlap with the
d
of
delicious (
Bread-elicious;
squidelicious -- "You can walk
along with them on a stick and eat them like a lollipop. Squidelicious!
(or is it Octopussilicious!?...)" (
link);
and bird foods
BirD-elicious and
Seed-elicious).
Portmanteauing of a word denoting food, eating, drink, or drinking with
delicious is an entirely
natural bit of word play, something that people could hit on on their
own, or on exposure to
ANY single example of the
formation. There's no need to search for an ur-portmanteau
serving as a model for all the others.
Eventually, we leave the world of portmanteaus and reach X-V
licious words that merely express a
judgment of great goodness or intense Xness:
scarf-elicious, referring to an
excellent scarf; a "Mac-alicious brain transplant", on the
MacAddict.com site; a photo showing lots of bikes and titled
bike-olicious; a photo of a dog
named Bug, which elicited the comment "You have captured the essence of
Bug-olicious in this one". In such examples, -V
licious is a jocular suffix of
approval.
Now, a little puzzle. I have a recollection of a "Barney Miller"
episode in which a man is arrested for assaulting someone responsible
for a pickle ad that offends the assailant deeply. I remember the
pickle ad as having the text "It's crunch-crunch-crunchalicious" -- to
which the assailant objected on the grounds that there is
NO
SUCH WORD as "crunchalicious". No doubt I've
mis-remembered the word, but it was certainly some jocular formation,
and I'm sure about the pickles. But I can find nothing relevant
by searching for <"Barney Miller" pickle>. Anybody have any
idea what I'm thinking of here?
You can see why I'm asking. The show "Barney Miller" ran from
1975 to 1982, so a "crunchalicious" (or something similar, like
"crundelicious") in it would move the -V
licious sightings back at least a
decade before "Wayne's World" and Blackalicious.
[Breaking news: Paul Deppler reminds me of Bubblicious Gum, which, according to the
wikipedia entry, dates back to 1977. Forward into the past! And now, Brett Altschul writes to observe, perceptively, that the "Wayne's World" exchange is surely modeled on Bubblicious Gum: "'She's magically babelicious,' must have been written with the gum specifically in mind, since the phrasing is also a joke related to marketing of sweets to children; it parodies the Lucky Charms slogan, 'They're magically delicious.'"]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 4, 2006 01:25 PM