Clipping Cartoons (It's Much More Fun Than Clipping Coupons)

Clipping, back-formation, and affixing, that is.

Clipping is a word creation process that takes a historically, multi-syllabic word and removes one or more syllables to form a smaller word. Some examples are: ad from advertisement, gas from gasoline, phone from telephone, and flu from influenza.

Because clipping does not change the lexical category or semantic interpretation of a word, the above cartoon actually illustrates a word creation process called back-formation.

Back-formation is similar to clipping but it can change the lexical category and/or semantic interpretation of a word. Examples include: couth from uncouth, and the verb burgle from the noun burglar.

Affixing is the process of creating words by adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes.

Image credits here.

Word Creation - Blimpworthy

If you are wondering which sporting event to watch this weekend, you may want to take the blimpworthiness factor of the options into consideration; Goodyear sure hopes you do.

Goodyear recently coined a new word in the name of marketing. Through the creative use of compounding and affixing, Goodyear wants sports fans to vote for the event they feel is most "blimpworthy" in a new series of ESPN online polls. By voting in the polls, sports fans help to determine which sports events the blimps will appear at on particular weekends.

More information about Goodyear and the polls here and here.

This is How They Verb Nouns

Seems to me that verbing of nouns has become one of the more popular methods of word creation these days. In linguistics this is called a functional shift. Here is an example from a billboard on I-75 in Michigan that advertises Avalanche Bay Waterpark.

THIS IS HOW WE WATERPARK!

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Facebook's Functional Shift