lackadaisical -- affixal gags

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

I have lackadaisical on my list of words that began their lives as affixal play but are now standard English; others include happenstance, talkative, speechify, toploftical, comeuppance, and not-quite-there-yet items like ownage and embiggen. Maybe has-been and wannabe could go here too.

nother involves the same principle, I think.  In fact it's my guess that just about all of the forms that we analyze as the results of metanalysis started out as jokes, though nobody ever acknowledges this. I mean, does anybody really think the French really misanalyzed unicorn as a sequence of article + noun, then analyzed l'icorne as a single word?  We seem to have trouble crediting our ancestors with a sense of humor.

I make these distinct from kitchen-latin coinings like bloviate, discombobulate, and conniptions.

geoff

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