May 12, 2007
Zippy's suffixiness
Things have lost all meaning for Zippy, but he hasn't lost the ability to play with morphology:
In my last survey
of playful morphology, I looked at ostentatious -ity (Zippy uses an expanded
version -osity in randomosity above), innovative -ness (of several types, including
the "Colbert suffix" -iness
in truthiness and faminess), playful -licious, and the profusion of -dar nouns. Above, Zippy adds
an
instance of -itude where the
default nominalizer -ness
would be expected and a new -ology
noun (which is morphologically well-formed if the base is taken to be a
noun: 'study of the absurd'). Zippy's into suffixes.
My survey posting has links to earlier ones on Language Log.
Now,
some developments since then on the -dar
and -iness fronts.
-dar. I noted earlier
that there seems to be no end of -dar
words, and pleaded with people
not to send me more. That request stands, but here's one of
special interest from Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued
site (hat tip to Ben Zimmer):
You develop what is called "playdar"--a bit like gaydar. Swingers can spot each other in public. A couple once picked me up in a regular bar. (link)
What makes playdar
interesting is that it rhymes with the original model radar and the intermediate model --
the probable vector for the spread of -dar
words -- gaydar. And it
has a meaning in the sexual domain. It
fits so well.
-iness. A while back I
added referenciness to truthiness and faminess, and suggested that there
might be a place for justiciness.
A reader suggested a possible application for justiciness:
Reflecting on the notions of truthiness and referenciness, I was reminded of a recent incident at my university in which a student plagiarized approximately 80% of his paper from an online source -- or rather, since faculty members at my university are not permitted to make such judgements, I should say that his paper bore a close resemblance to the online source, in a number of passages an exact resemblance for several paragraphs at a time. The Associate Dean who reviewed the case, however, found that there was no intent to deceive; it was merely 'sloppiness'. The student's penalty (if such it may be called) was simply to resubmit the work. I thought this might qualify as an instance of justiciness. It's certainly an instance of silliness.
(My correspondent noted that the student missed his extended
deadline, so that "a certain justice prevailed after all".)
There is, at the moment, only one webhit for justiciness that isn't by me, and
that one refers to me. This is by the blogger Shinga, examining
claims by Patrick Holford about the connection between food
allergies/intolerance and IgG (Immunoglobulin G) antibody levels.
Citing me and quoting Ben Goldacre, Shinga suggests that Holford might
be practicing referencinesss, adding:
To borrow further from Zwicky, there
would be a certain justiciness is seeing this nonsense exposed for what
it is.
I'm not at all sure that justiciness
would be the right word choice here. In the plagiarism example,
the dean's decision wasn't justice but something that merely had the
appearance of justice; that puts it in the neighborhood of truthiness,
faminess, and referenciness. My understanding of the Holford case
is that exposing "this nonsense for what it is" would actually be
justice. But maybe I'm misunderstanding Shinga's intent.
Or maybe she wasn't using the Colbert suffix -- with its connotation
of falseness, inauthenticity, or masquerade -- at all, but rather the
positive -iness reported on
here in Mark Liberman's discussion
of hostiness, the magnetic quality that all good TV hosts have.
Yet another -iness turned
up this week on the American Dialect Society mailing list, where David
Bowie wrote on the 8th:
I subscribe to several of the Woody's
Office Watch family of email newsletters, and the past few "EMAIL
Essentials" ones have dealt with spam filtering. Near the beginning of
the latest one is the following:
You and I can glance at a message and
know right-away if it's spam or not. Computers are nowhere near as
smart and probably never will be, all a spam filter can do is analyse a
message and work out the likelihood that it is spam. It's not a simple
Yes/No but a sliding scale of (with apologies to Stephen Colbert)
'spaminess'.
I would have probably spelled it
"spamminess" myself, but it's interesting to see "-iness" being used
actively to mean something like "something like this noun, but not
exactly like it" with an overt nod to the Colbert Report.
This is just neutral -iness,
denoting approximation along some cline, without the disparaging
connotation of the Colbert suffix or the positive, approving
connotation of hostiness.
As Larry Horn quickly pointed out on ADS-L, there is some tradition in
linguistics and psychology for using -iness
in contexts where what is usually treated as a categorical binary
distinction -- either X or not -- is instead treated as a matter of
degree, as in Haj Ross's 1973 paper "Nouniness" or in work on prototype
semantics, where notions like "birdiness" are bandied about.
Larry noted that George Lakoff (in a 1972 CLS paper "Hedges") treated
truth itself as a matter of degree. As Larry puts it:
... "a chicken is a bird" or "a
penguin is a bird" was considered to be less...well, truthy than "a
robin is a bird".
But this isn't Colbert's truthiness (which disparages propositions
because they fail to be true despite being put forward as if they
were), and I wouldn't myself use truthy
in describing Lakoff's ideas; I'd say that Lakoff maintained that "a
penguin is a bird" is simply less true than "a robin is a bird".
(A digression. It turns out that the word birdiness has some currency in a
completely different context, namely the world of hunting dogs, where a
dog is said to be birdie/birdy -- both spellings are out there -- if
it's interested in birds. See, for example, this site
of "Questions and Answers On Birdiness and Scenting".)
In any case, plain approximative -iness
has been around for some time and has its uses -- I think spamminess is a good coining -- but
Colbert shouldn't be getting credit for it.
Then there's the title of
this posting, where -iness
isn't approximative at all. Zippy's suffixiness is a matter of
being fascinated with suffixes (like birdy dogs with birds), playing
with them, using a lot of them. Zippy is a suffixy guy.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 12, 2007 03:11 PM