verse

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yeah, but those "-verses" are figurative "universes." Same song, second
verse.

"Multiverse," which refers to a bunch of actual universes, has been around
for decades. (My office mate was talking about them in the mid '70s.)

JL


On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: verse
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Jeff Prucher <jprucher at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > See Brave New Words and the OED SF Citations project for some work on the
> suffix
> > -verse. Note that in both sources, we have been primarily concerned with
> only
> > two of the various issues you raise -- the word "multiverse" and "-verse"
> used
> > to specify a fictional universe (as in Buffyverse, Marvelverse, etc.).
>
> In its current use as a suffix (or what Arnold Zwicky calls a
> "libfix"), "-verse" doesn't have to specify a *fictional* universe.
> See, e.g., "Googleverse" and "Twitterverse":
>
> http://www.wordspy.com/words/Googleverse.asp
> http://www.wordspy.com/words/Twitterverse.asp
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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