Ben's rando, Virginia's retronyms

[Jonathan Lighter]

Did I mention "convo" (conversation), heard a week or so ago? "To keep the
convo going."

This "-o" business has been going on in Australia more than here for at
least fifty years.

JL


On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:57 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Ben's rando, Virginia's retronyms
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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