Affix of the decade

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Dec 21 16:23:10 UTC 2009


At 10:08 AM -0600 12/21/09, Scot LaFaive wrote:
>I know we like to do the Word of the Year every year, but I think this
>decade also calls for an Affix of the Year. Namely, the prefix "i-" as in
>"iPod," "iPlayer," "iCarly," "iGoogle," etc. It seems to be increasingly
>used with technology hoping to be "hip" and "coo." Can i get a second?
>
>iScot

Sure thing.  I have a soft spot for un-, as extended to both un-verbs
("undelete", "unerase", "unfriend") and un-nouns ("uncandidate",
"un-Clinton", "unbank"), not to slight the appeal of
always...er...lively un-adjectives like "undead".  But if the 1990's
were the decade of e-, the Double-Aughts are definitely the iDecade.
(Not to be confused with the Me Decade, which was of course the 70s,
as previously noted here.)

LH

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