John Cowan (02/10): The Jargon File's...

Isms, gasms, etc.

on Language Log from 4 weeks ago

The Jargon File's prefatory matter discusses several kinds of expressive morphology (though not by that name) which do not appear in your 1987 paper:

Doubling a verb to create a peculiar sentence type: Lose, lose 'This is a losing situation', Win, win, Chomp, chomp, etc.

Distorting proper names to insult their referents: Microsloth, Windoze, Internet Exploder. The phrase for hysterical raisins 'for historical reasons' also belongs here, as the original phrase is often used to justify infelicities.

The suffix /pi/, a novel inflection that puts verbs (often verbs that are nouned, often with strange meanings) into the interrogative mood, otherwise unheard-of in English: /ˈfudpi/ 'Do you want food?', /ˈsplɪtpi ˈsup/ 'Does anyone want to split a bowl of soup with me?' (with a pun on split-pea soup).

Many examples are also provided of "extending [affixes] to contexts where they don't usually go": mysteriosity, dubiosity, ferrosity, obviosity; winnitude, lossitude, lameitude, disgustitude; hackification; bogotify 'make bogus'. In some cases, inflectional affixes are similarly overapplied, such as cabeese 'cabooses', boxen 'computers, seen generically as mere "boxes"', frobbotzim (plural of frobbotz 'small component of uncertain purpose'), Unices 'variants of Unix', semicola 'semicolons', polygoose 'mongooses'. It's not clear that the last is in active use.