-ify and -ification

[Laurence Horn]

I always thought one of the more creative examples of what you and Geoff call "playful" word formation was "Californication", which—before it became a Red Hot Chili Peppers song or a series on Showtime—was a word of warning used by folks in Oregon (and elsewhere?) urging wariness if not strong resistance toward unbridled growth lest their pristine coastline turn into (shudder) L.A. Mark II.

Checking on wiki, I find that the warning was far more widespread, and the coinage far older (I remember it from the early 1980s) than I knew:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californication_(word)

Californication is a portmanteau of the words California and fornication, appearing in Time on May 6, 1966 and written about on August 21, 1972, additionally seen on bumper stickers in the U.S. states of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. It was a term popular in the 1970s and referring primarily to the  "haphazard, mindless development [of land] that has already gobbled up most of Southern California", which some attributed to an influx of Californians to other states in the Western United States. […]
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LH 

On Aug 28, 2011, at 12:42 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/pepsification/
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org