Ben's rando, Virginia's retronyms

[Laurence Horn]

In his "On Language" column in this weekend's Times Sunday Magazine,
Ben Z writes about student slang, citing the master (Connie Eble) and
others, and discusses "rando" (for a sketchy random stranger).
Something that strikes me about this form is that while looking
superficially as though it's formed from truncating "random", "rando"
is yet another derogatory -o label, as in "weirdo", "fatso", "wino",
"psycho", and such.  I figure there must be a paper on these
somewhere in American Speech but a quick web search instead pulled up
this summary by Mikael Parkvall on Linguist List:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-360.html.  (some interesting
cross-linguistic observations therein)

Two pages later, Virginia Heffernan's touching eulogy to the
old-fashioned telephone is rife with retronyms, from the standard
("analog landline telephone") to the recondite ("wireful"), and
"rotary" must be in there somewhere.  Reminds me--this time of year
you can't follow football without hearing more than you ever wanted
to know about the "human polls".

LH

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