(quasi-)neologisms

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon May 9 15:10:27 UTC 2005


 From a recent novel featuring life among 20-somethings in New York.
OK, one of these is evidently not new, but represents an unfamiliar
construction to me:

"obsessive much?" as a query, evidently a rhetorical question, to
which the anticipated (non-vocalized) answer is "Yes, X is/are indeed
very obsessive (about whatever it is)".  Michael Adams can perhaps
tell us whether this is a Buffyism.  A quick tour of google hits
(703, some but not most of which are false positives involving
sentence breaks between the "obsessive" and the "much") doesn't
indicate this, but it *sounds* like a Buffyism.  Which doesn't of
course mean that it was first launched on the show, of course.

"tie-to-the-bedable", adj.  (with a reasonably compositional
meaning).  No google hits, but the formation process is obviously
productive.

larry



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