Q: `workaholic'

[Jim Rader]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
A few comments on Larry Trask's original post and the followups by
Benji Wald, Gabriella Rundblad, "chris" (sorry I can't fill out  your
full name), and Guido Mensching:
 
I believe the more or less customary criteria for the term "stump
compound" would only be met by <sitcom>, i.e., words shortened from
compounds or multiword collocations by breaking off and combining
(usually) initial elements--sometimes, as in the case of <sitcom>,
more on an orthographic than phonetic foundation.  Students of
Russian word formation have used "stump compound" to refer to the
blizzard of common and proper nouns conjured up by Russians in this
manner since the beginning of the Soviet period; some of these have
found their way into English, such as <agitprop>, <Comintern>, and
<samizdat> (the latter a humorous play on names of state publishing
organs, such as <Goslitizdat> from <Gosudarstvennoe literaturnoe
izdatel'stvo>).  Stump compounds are also well-attested from German,
e.g., <Gestapo> (Geheime Staatspolizei) and <Stuka> (Sturzkampfflug-
zeug) from the Nazi period; some, such as <Hiwi> (Hilfsfreiwillige),
display other word-formation processes at work.
 
To refer to formatives such as <-(a)holic>, <-o/arama>, and
<-(a)thon>, Valerie Adams used the term "splinter"--though she called
the words thus formed (<chocoholic>, <foodarama>) "blends" in line
with previous terminology.  Adams (in _An Introduction to Modern
English Word Formation_, Longman, 1973, p. 142) says she took the
term from a 1961 article by J.M. Berman, "Contribution on Blending,"
in the _Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanstik_ 9: 278-81.  I
guess I would define a splinter as a phonetic piece of a word that
retains the meaning, or some facet of the meaning, of its source, and
functions as a bound form joined to either words or other bound
elements.  As was pointed out in the quote from _The Handbook of
Morphology_, rear-end formatives such as <-(a)holic> and <-o/arama>
fit a prosodic template:  the outcome works most successfully as a
word if it fits the syllable count and accent pattern of the source
the splinter was extracted from (I prefer "extracted" to
"abstracted").  I suspect there is some interplay here between the
interpretation--whether etymologically based or not--of the first
syllables of <alcoholic>, <panorama>, and <marathon> as neo-classical
"combining forms" that end in orthographic <o> or <a>, phonetically
schwa.
 
Presumably there are also front-end splinters such as <para-> (in
<paratrooper>, <paradrop>) and <heli-> (in <heliport>, <heliborne>),
though these may begin life as a species of stump compound in which
the entire second element is retained ("parachute trooper").  Again,
I think parsing (often unetymological) of these elements as
Greco-Latin "combining forms" contributes to their success.  <Para->
is also a Greek-origin prefix, and a word such as <paramedic> is
potentially ambiguous, there being evidence for its use both in the
sense "medical technician" (in effect backformed from <paramedical>)
and (much rarer) "doctor parachuted into a remote area."
 
The semantics of splinters are interesting and lexicographically
challenging.  As pointed out by Benji Wald, the <-(a)holic> words
reflect a sort of humorous attenuation:  the addiction of a
chocoholic or shopaholic is not the addiction of an alcoholic.  What
I find interesting is the way that splinters, whether front-end or
rear-end, retain the meaning, sometimes fractured or expanded, of the
complete source word, e.g., <heli-> is as it were a "combining form"
of <helicopter>.  This is similar to the process by which Greco-Latin
"combining forms" are recycled with the meaning of a particular
compound; hence, <photo-> in <photocopy> means "photograph," not
"light" (perhaps augmented by the clipped form <photo> =
"photograph"), <petro-> in <petrodollar> means "petroleum
industry",not "rock," etc., etc.  To the best of my knowledge this
process, which is quite productive in English, has little basis in
the history of Greek or Latin word formation.  A much better analogy
is furnished by Chinese compounds such as <Zhongwen>, <zhongshi>,
etc., in which <zhong> has the meaning of <Zhongguo> "China," not the
literal sense "middle," which it retains in many other compounds.
 
I like <Kontaminativkompositum>, but it will never float in English.
 
Jim Rader
 
> Me again.  Is there an accepted name for the slightly peculiar process
> in which a piece of a word is somewhat arbitrarily ripped out of it
> and then used as a kind of affix for forming new words?
>
> I'm thinking of cases like these:
>
> alcoholic --> -(o)holic --> workaholic, chocoholic, shopaholic,...
>
> Marathon --> -(a)thon --> telethon, bikeathon, danceathon,...
>
> panorama --> -(o)rama --> washorama, launderama,...
>
> Watergate --> -gate --> Irangate, Contragate, Whitewatergate,...
>
>