Andrew Sullivan's new word

Andrew Sullivan, writing about a New York Times article on blogs, coins a new word:

The good news is that the blogosphere has grown so large and robust that we can now slag each other off with abandon. Attaguys!

Google turns up no hits for it, but might by the time you read this. Needless to say, those hits will be at andrewsullivan.com and here ([so why did you say it? -- ed.]). Naturally, SC checked for parallel coinages:

attagirls: 340 hits
attaboys: 6,170 hits
attaladies: zip, zero, nada -- but a suggested spelling correction to "attaliades" (which turns out to be someone's last name)

Some statistics for the more likely singular forms:

attaboy: 78,800 hits
attagirl: 2,780

The derivation is obvious enough that we won't go through it. But that leaves open the disturbing stylistic question of why Sullivan felt a need to coin "attaguys".

Comments

[Mark Liberman]

But I think you missed "attaguy", which has 19 ghits, one of which is from 2001 (and others might be older, for all I know).

[Mark Liberman]

The OED glosses "attaboy" as "An exclamation expressive of encouragement or admiration. Hence attagirl, etc., as nonce-wds."

The citations include "at-a-baby", but no other instantiations of "etc."

Still, I think this can be said to predict "attaguys" among many other things.

[Semantic Compositions]

You're right; I didn't think to google the singular "attaguy".

But my confusion at Sullivan's invocation of "attaguys!" isn't that it wasn't predictable; after all, I didn't search the OED, but I did call the derivation "obvious". What I'm really wondering about is why Sullivan chose to use that form, which in spite of its predictability occurs nowhere else on the web. Not even once. Sullivan must therefore have had some very particular stylistic effect in mind, and in reading it, I am completely unable to intuit what his purpose could have been.

[polyglotconspiracy]

Wouldn't the feminine parallel to "attaguy" be "attagal"? It gets 160 hits [though many of these don't seem to be on target], and "attagals" gets two.

Maybe the word simply manifests the inclination to use "guys" more than "boys"--a Googlefight between them has "guys" winning by more than twice as many hits. Not many people address their peers as, "Hey boys, how's it going?" anymore. "Guys" seems more common--and more general (even unisex). He needn't be intending a stylistic effect beyond altering (updating?) the term for consistency with his own use of one of its components.

[Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey]

I agree with polyglot: it seems like Sullivan just sought (rather self-consciously) to update the sexist 'attaboy' with 'guy,' a term which is increasingly gender-neutral (a development I'm certain would puzzle Mr. Nathan Detroit and his peers no end). In Milwaukee the androgynous use of 'guy' has been in place for at least the quarter-century I've dwelt here; nobody here on the UWM campus even blinks when a person of either gender tells a cluster of beautiful young women "I'll see you guys later!"; whereas the use of 'gals' would mark the speaker as either deliberately and pretentiously retro, or merely unspeakably old and out of it.

[cancergrrrl]

Don't start with saying that GUY is gender neutral and unisex...since ATTAGUY would be as much masculine as ATTABOY. You look around and try to call a female a guy she'll look funny at you..and god knows GUYS is just as annoying but men have been able to slip it into common day talk and now females are too friggin stupid to put an end to it and now they are calling themeselved guys when they don't see it's just the same as calling themselves men...stupid world we live in.