Contraction action, where’s your traction?

Here's what someone's morning might be like in a world in which the person who coined the term blog was in charge of naming other things as well:

I wake to the sound of my kradio. The news chorperson calls on the therman, who says it's going to be cloudy with a chance of derstorms later. I switch over to a rap station; listening to phop really gets me moving in the morning.

After showering, I find some clean derwear and get dressed. There's some cold ftover coffee in the feepot, so I heat it in the crowave, while making urdough toast using the roven.

I grab my fcase and I'm out the door. I'm driving a loaner kup at the moment—the chback is in the shop.

And so on. You get the idea.

I was going to go on to talk about such abbreviations as people referring to a Social Security number as a social, but then I discovered I'd discussed that before, in an entry from a couple years ago, so I'll refrain.

Also perhaps related to all this is the way people form new compounds based on back-formating old ones. The most common examples are probably terms like cheeseburger and fishwich; also the use of -gate (from Watergate, which didn't have anything to do with gates) to create names for scandals: Irangate, Monicagate, etc. See the -Gate Suffix page for more.

6 Responses to “Contraction action, where’s your traction?”

  1. Vardibidian

    … Surely the verb form is back-formationing, not back-formating

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  2. Shmuel

    “Back-formationing” is too unwieldy. How about “back-forming”?

    reply
  3. Celia

    I had a friend in college who went by the nickname Thew.

    reply
  4. David Moles

    My hatred for the word blog — as, for that matter, my hatred for the conceptual entity it represents — has gradually been beaten down into a constant, low-grade, nearly subliminal disgust.

    reply
  5. Michael

    Perhaps a blog comment should be an ogment? It’s a nice confusion for augment. I recall that Vardibidian has discussed in the past how a blog is improved by comments from active participants, even when the total numbers are still small.

    Usage: I don’t have a blog, but I do post ogments to other people’s blogs.

    reply
  6. David Moles

    Speakers of certain dialects of English might be more tempted by ogument.

    reply

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