In linguistics, a libfix is a productive bound morpheme affix created by rebracketing and back-formation, often a generalization of a component of a blend word. For example, walkathon was coined in 1932 as a blend of walk and marathon,[ Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2009, s.v. walkathon] and soon thereafter the -athon part was reinterpreted as a libfix meaning "event or activity lasting a long time or involving a great deal of something".[Merriam-Webster dictionary online s.v. -athon][ Oxford English Dictionary, 1972, s.v. -athon] Words formed with this suffix include talkathon, telethon, hackathon, and so on. Affixes whose morpheme boundaries are etymologically based, and which are used in their original sense, are not libfixes. Libfixes often utilise epenthesis, as in the example of -holism and -holic which are joined with consonant-final segments via the vowel ⟨a⟩, creating work -a-holism or sex -a-holism.
History
Splinters were defined by Berman in 1961 as non-morphemic word fragments. This includes not just libfixes, but also word fragments which become words, like
burger (<
hamburger),
flu (<
influenza), and
net (<
network).
[Laurie Bauer, "The borderline between derivation and compounding", p. 97-108 in Morphology and its Demarcations, Selected papers from the 11th Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2004][J.M. Berman, "Contribution on Blending", Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 9:278-281 (1961) (not seen)][Ingrid Fandrych, "Submorphemic elements in the formation of acronyms, blends and clippings", Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology 2 (2008) ]
The name libfix was coined by Arnold Zwicky in 2010 as a blend of " liberated" and "af fix" specifically for splinters used as productive morphemes.["Libfixes", Arnold Zwicky's Blog, January 23, 2010]
Criticism
Some of these formations have been considered barbarisms by prescriptive writers on style,
[Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, , s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454] though other writers have praised them. Speaking of the
-tron suffix, a philologist commented:
I once heard an unkind critic allude disparagingly to these neologisms as dog-Greek. To a lover of the language of Sophocles and Plato these recent coinages may indeed appear to be Greek debased. More appropriately, perhaps, they might be termed lion-Greek or chameleon-Greek. They are Neo-Hellenic in the genuine Renaissance tradition.[Simeon Potter, Our Language, 1950, as quoted in Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, , s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454]
Examples
Each example gives the affix, the source word(s) from which it was formed, the meaning, and examples.
This list does not include:
-
affixes based on English words like tech or burger used literally, even if they are shortened forms, in this case, for technology and hamburger;
-
affixes which are aligned in form and meaning with their etymological source, like -(o)cracy or -orama in cyclorama and diorama from ὅραμα 'spectacle'; motorama is a portmanteau of motor and orama, not a compound of mot- and -orama;
-
words which have been separated from phrases, e.g. fu from kung fu.
English
Suffixes
- -ana
- things related to a given person, place, period
- : Churchilliana, Americana, Victoriana
- -ase
- an enzyme
- : lactase, polymerase
- -cation
- kinds of vacation
- : staycation, girlcation
- -copter
- having a spinning rotor allowing for flight
- : gyrocopter
- -core
- aesthetic, hardcore punk derivatives, hardcore techno derivatives
- : speedcore, grindcore, cottagecore, bardcore
- -dar
- the skill of detecting qualities or things
- : gaydar, humordar, Jewdar
- -erati
- groups of people with common interests
- : digerati, glitterati
- -flation
- economic inflation in a particular field
- : tipflation, stagflation, shrinkflation
- -gasm
- an intensely pleasurable experience
- : foodgasm, cargasm, shoegasm, nerdgasm
- -gate
- a scandal
- : gamergate, troopergate; see List of "-gate" scandals
- -(m)(a)geddon
- major disasters (usually facetious)
- : snowgeddon, Hurricane Irma
- -(a)holic, -(a)holism
- addict(ed)
- : shopaholic, workaholic, Sexual addiction; see
- -kini
- type of bathing suit
- : burkini, monokini, tankini
- -(i/e/a/∅)licious
- a high degree of some property (usually jocular)
[Zwicky, 2006]
- : bootylicious, babelicious, yummalicious, sacrilicious, crunchalicious
- -(o)nomics
- an economic policy or philosophy
- : Reaganomics, freakonomics
- -ola
- used to form commercial products; later, for forms of bribery
[ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. -ola suffix 2]
- : Victrola, moviola, shinola; payola, plugola
- -oma
- a kind of tumor, swelling, or cancer
- : melanoma, adenoma, papilloma
- -ome, -omics
- a map of a biological system; and other uses in biology
- : connectome, proteome; biome, rhizome, vacuome
- -on
- an elementary particle or quasiparticle
- : proton, neutron, meson, phonon, etc.; see List of particles
- -preneur
- an entrepreneur in some domain
- : intrapreneur, ecopreneur, mompreneur
- -pocalypse
- a catastrophic event
- : snowpocalypse, robopocalypse, beepocalypse
- -tard
- people who are foolish or stupid; pejorative
- : fucktard, libtard
- -(a)thon, -a-thon
- things that last a long time or require remarkable endurance
- : walkathon, telethon, hackathon
- -tron
- a kind of vacuum tube; a subatomic particle; a device
- : magnetron; positron; cyclotron
- -verse
- the collection of all things in a category, or a fictional universe
- : blogoverse, Twitterverse, Whoniverse
- -wich
- sandwich
- : fishwich, hamwich, snackwich
- -zilla
- monstrous, scary, or large things; can function as an augmentative and pejorative
- : bridezilla, Mozilla
Prefixes
- alt-
- outside the mainstream
- : alt-rock, alt-right
- cyber-
- issues or policies related to computers
- : cyberspace, cybercrime
- eco-
- related to the environment, to ecology, or to sustainability
- : eco-terrorism, eco-nationalism, eco-investing
- econo-
- related to economics; economical, inexpensive
- : econometrics (not * economometrics), econophysics; econobox
- franken-
- related to “human efforts to interfere with nature”
- : frankenfood, frankenplant, frankenscience
- glut-
- related to glutamic acid, one of the
- : glutamine, glutamate
- heli-
- types of helicopters; things related to helicopters
[ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. heli-, combining form]
- : helibus; helipad, heliport, helidrome, heliborne
- petro-
- things related to petroleum
- : petrodollar, petrochemical, petrocurrency
- syn-
- synthetic; related to (musical) synthesizers
- : syngas, synfuel, syncrude, Synclavier
Italian
Suffix
- -opoli
- a scandal
- : Bancopoli, Calciopoli
Bibliography
-
Bernard Fradin, "Combining forms, blends, and related phenomena", in Ursula Doleschal, Anna M. Thornton, eds., Extragrammatical and Marginal Morphology, LINCOM studies in theoretical linguistics 12 (2000), , papers from a workshop in Vienna, 1996, p. 11-59 full text
-
Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin, 1922, 19: 13-15
-
Muriel Norde, Sara Sippach, " Nerdalicious scientainment: A network analysis of English libfixes", Word Structure 12:3:353-384 .
-
Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Max Bittker. "NYTWIT: A Dataset of Novel Words in the New York Times", Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Barcelona), p. 6509–6515, December 8–13, 2020. full text
-
Neal Whitman, "A linguistic tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to -zilla, The Week, September 17, 2013.
-
Arnold Zwicky, "Playing with your Morphology", Language Log, August 28, 2006
Notes
