George Lakoff (and others) on "foodie"

[Roland Sussex]

I have been collecting forms like this in Australian English for quite some time, and a database of what looks like being over 4,000 items will hopefully go up on the Web in the coming months. I’ll let the List know when it goes live.

Australians create these forms very widely: for proper names (cities and towns: Rockhampton, Qld = Rocky; people: former Prime Minister Bob Hawke = Hawkie), cars (a utility = a ute or a tilly), wines (cabernet = cab), vegetables (mandarine = mandy), insects (mosquito = mozzie), professions (ambo = ambulance officer, fierie = fire officer) and much more. They involve a number of different morphological formations, of which –y/-ie constitute about half.

Anna Wierzbicka pointed to “solidarity” as a common feature of these forms. They are typically spoken (though “Aussie" is now common in the written language inside and outside Australia), informal, and used as a kind of in-group code, to the point where not using them with friends can sound distancing. But semantically speaking they are much wider than just diminutives.

Roly Sussex
The University of Queensland

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Date:    Tue, 1 Jul 2014 09:21:00 -0400
From:    Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU<mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>>
Subject: George Lakoff (and others) on "foodie"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/beyond-foodie-its-about-our-values.html
[see embedded link for the Mark Bittman op-ed at issue]

Note that Lakoff's argument presupposes that the -ie of "foodie" is the same suffix that we have in "Barbie", "baggie", "birdie", "hoodie", and "selfie", but none of these are quasi-agentives the way "foodie" is, and other than the -ie or -y hypocoristic for names (Barbie, Georgie, Billy,..), the others are diminutives for non-human objects.  You'd think a more relevant example might be "hippie", "Yippee", or even "commie", where an Xie is someone adhering to the X philosophy or an aficionado/true-believer in X. (There are probably other examples I'm not remembering.  Anyone else?)  These may well be trivializing, but it's not just the -ie form that's responsible for trivializing and pejoration; we've spent some time knocking around the -er of "truther", "birther", etc. for 'adherent of the X conspiracy', also .  I agree with the following letter suggesting that "foodist" might be the best choice, unless it's too reminiscent of "nudist" (given the rhyme) or "naturist".

L

P.S.  I guess an anti- might also try "foodite", as in Trotskyite (vs. neutral "Trotskyist"), but that sounds too much like a chemical additive that foodies would resist.


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