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Making up words requires suffixes—word endings. In English, there are two major types of suffixes. Some endings INFLECT nouns, verbs and adjectives, and adverbs to show their grammatical forms: plural, possessive, past tense, comparative, superlative. And some endings DERIVE new words from old, like –ify which makes a verb out of a noun or –ness which makes a noun out of an adjective or –y, which makes an adjective out of a noun (and which got quite a workout in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series). As with prefixes, there are traffic rules. You can add –ness to clever, happy and sad but not intelligent, depressed and ecstatic. And we say curiousity or curiousness but verbosity rather than verboseness.

One suffix that’s puzzles me is –er. The vast majority of –er words are added to verbs to make them into one who ___s: teacher, farmer, professor (with the erudite variant –or). Lots of exceptions exist that involve implied or outright metaphor: lifer, looker, officer, lawyer, mother f***er. The –er words that are especially confusing to me are the words truther, birther, deather. And there’s a set of double –er compounds too: fixer upper, picker upper (check out early November for my attempt to add to this with breaker downer). I should have tried looker overer for the triple –er hat trick.

Some languages, by the way, use circumfixes and infixes too. English has a causative circumfixed em—–en, as in embolden or Homer Simpson’s embiggen. But we don’t use that technique much. And we have infixes for expressive purposes in polysyllables: like mathe-freakin-matics, or responsi-freakin-bitity.

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March was about prefixes. The un- of uncool, unknowable, unpredicatable, unintelligible, uninhabited, and so forth. Attached to adjectives, un- means not. It also means not when attached to nouns, like undead, uncola, and the great unwashed. But attached to verbs, un- means to reverse the effect of: to undo, untie, unfasten, unbutton. So there are rules for prefixes that are sensitive to the part of speech of the root word.

The same goes for ex-. You can have an ex-spouse or ex-friend or ex-president or be an ex-student or ex-employee. But you can’t ex-marry or ex-friend or ex-employ. Ex- goes with nouns but verbs. There is a grammar to prefixes (all fixes, really) and we call this grammar morphology.

Prefixes can be ambiguous just as words can. Take in-, for example. Semantically in- is sometimes like un- or ex- in words like indescribable, intangible, indefensible, infallible, incredible, inevitable, inept, inability (which is the noun form of unable, oddly). It means not. Of course, sometimes the in- changes its sound shape to homophonize with a following consonant: impossible, improbable, irregular, illegal, but that’s another story.

Sometimes in- just means in. As in indent, income, immigrant, and impediment. This brings us to the words ingratiate and ingrate, two unrelated words that sound like they should be related but aren’t. In ingratiate, you are trying to get in the good graces of someone. But if you are an ingrate, you are ungrateful (there that in-/un- switch again). And so course, this is why words like inflammable as confusing.

Is it not flammable or is it able to burst into flame? Words have an internal structure and if you correctly interpret inflammable as able to burst into flames you are treating the [inflame] as one part and able as added to that: [[inflame] able] if you adopt the other meaning you are putting flame and able together first, then adding in: [in[flammable]]. It’s a natural enough thing to do.

One of my students, by the way, suggested—in jest, I think—that implode meant not explode. It’s an unimpossible analysis, I think. I suppose that infallible could also mean able to fall into. Hmm.

Returning to the realm of the unimpossible, the same ambiguity arises with un- and –able. Things can be undoable, untieable, unbuttonable, and unzippable—able to be undone or not able to be done, etcetera. Not all prefixes mean not, by the way. But a lot do: a- and an-, un-, in-, de-, ex-.

Before we leave prefixes, I should point out the word defixes, that I introduced to refer to prefixes (or suffixes) that get promoted to words, like ex, bi, ism, and ish. A student suggested ishness, which uses the promoted prefix ish as the root. And this can work the other way too: words can be pressed into service as affixes (more next time).

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If you Febrify something, you reduce it by 1/15th or 2/30th. So for February it makes sense to introduce the technique of clipping. You shorten a word, from the front (auto from automobile, gas from gasoline, dorm from dormitory, exam from examination) or from the end (zine, burger, hood). You can even sometimes clip words from both sides at once: flu, from influenza, fridge from refrigerator or Lisa from Elizabeth. (Why yes, many nicknames are clippings).

Clipping can be tricky, by the way, and can blend into blending when you clip parts of two words and then blend them— WiFi (wireless + fidelity), hazmat (hazardous + material). If fact, most blends have a certain amount of clipping in them. Take nomophophobia (NO muh fuh FO bi uh) the fear of being without a cell phone or cell phone signal. It has a lot of internal clipping (no+mobile+phone+phobia) and manages to sneak in muh fuh as well.

Doubtcome from doubt + outcome and testosterantics from testosterone + antics also have that internal clipping. My favorite February clipping was venge, clipped simultaneously from avenge and revenge and kimpy from skimpy (kimpy, of course, is even skimpier than skimpy, see the discussion of tumble and stumble above).

Jonathan Swift didn’t care for clipping, by the way, complaining that “This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect.” Then again, Swift also proposed eating babies.

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Blends are words formed by taking two (or more) words and pushing them together, dropping some sounds and letters. So “smoke + fog” become “smog, breakfast + lunch” becomes“brunch”, “spoon + fork” becomes “spork”. You see what’s going on.

Lots of words common words are blends: bash (bang + smash), Muppet (marionette + puppet), dumbfound (dumb + confound), sitcom (situation + comedy), squiggle (squirm + wiggle), ginormous (giant + enormous), glitz (glamour + ritz), glob (gob + blob), guesstimate (guess + estimate) and of course hassle (haggle + tussle). Some blends can be quite clever, like bananus (banana + anus) for the brown part at the end of a banana or flempty (full + empty) for half full and half empty. Both are from the Urban Dictionary and good for a laugh in an introduction to linguistics class. Notice how empfuljust doesn’t work. Blends need to sounds like real words and be transparent in their meanings. And does anyone say knork (knife +fork)?

Blends, by the way, are sometimes called portemanteau words. A portemanteau was a “large suitcase with two halves that close together. It’s from Middle French porter (to carry) + manteau (mantle).

I tried to start the year with a triple blend resolvevolvolution from resolve + evolve + resolution. It doesn’t roll well off the tongue. But we have to start somewhere. One of my favorites was flossolalia, blending floss + glossolalia (speaking in tongues) to refer to unintelligible speech that occurs when you talk to someone while flossing your teeth (my wife wants me to make it clear that this is my vice, not hers).

There’s preventertainment for school programs featuring local celebrities warning about gangs, drug use, sex, drinking, etc. and flabricate meaning to lie about one’s waist size or weight. There’s snubbub for a noisy misunderstanding arising from a perceived slight and punxatognostication (PUNK-suh-TOG-nos-TIK-a -SHUN) for predictions made by a groundhog from (Punxsutawney + prognostication). I don’t expect that one to catch on, but I’d love to see news anchors try it.

I overheard (“witheard) a former student tweet hangry (to become angry due to hunger). Another student suggested movementum (the rate at which a popular, coordinated action proceeds). Dawndle (not getting out of bed when the alarm goes off), from dawn + dawdle, worked nicely but textumble (to fall up or down steps while texting, or the fall itself) was a head-scratcher: should it be textstumble from text + stumble ortext tumble from text + tumble (and why is stumble so similar to tumbleanyway?)