Antedating of "Pinko"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:43 AM -0700 1/9/06, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote:
>Interesting. Joseph J. Firebaugh, in "The Vocabulary of 'Time' Magazine,"
>Am. Speech, 15, 3 (Oct. 1940) gives two items containing 'pinko-' from Time
>in 1926: 'pinko-liberal' (Jan. 7) and 'pinko-political' (June 14). On
>the basis of these I had assumed that the '-o' of 'pinko' arose from
>its use as a pseudo-pseudo-prefix (after pseudo-prefixes like
>'Greco-', 'Anglo-' and 'pseudo-' itself) based on the use of 'pink'
>in this sense, which goes back much further. If Fred's 1925 cite of
>'pinko'  really is the first use of the form, this hypothesis would
>seem to be wrong -- but then, why the '-o'?
>
>Geoff Nunberg
>
>>pinko (OED, adj. 2., 1957)
>
>>1925 _Time_ 29 June  The gulf that yawns today between Wall Street and
>>Vesey Street, where the now pinko Nation is published, was narrower in
>>those days.

Just got around to this one (still running behind post-ABQ).  I
always aligned the -o of "pinko" not with the Greco-/Anglo-/pseudo-
combining element but with other cases in which pejorative nominals
(in particular, pigeonholing/categorizing nominals, after the
observations of Bolinger, Wierzbicka et al. on that function of
nouns) are derived from adjectives.  In some cases, we can indeed
detect (at least etymologically) a combining form in certain
pejorative nominals:  nympho, klepto, schizo, homo.  But in many
others we can't:  weirdo, sicko, fatso, wino, wacko, lezbo.  I would
assimilate "pinko" to the latter category, and in any case not to
that of eminently upscale forms like "Greco-" and "Franco-".

I guess this could be seen as another instance of
reanalysis/eggcorniness, if we assume that the
nympho/klepto/schizo/homo class was reparsed as containing a
pejorative noun-forming -o suffix, giving rise to the
weirdo/wino/pinko class.

And then there are later spinoffs like "stupido", presumably
incorporating the Spanish masculine marker but not coincidentally
meshing with the other pejorative -o's.

There must be an American Speech article on these somewhere, no?

larry