Semantic Compositions was amused yesterday morning by some before and after pictures of Senator Kerry. At first, SC thought "has he had plastic surgery?", but figured that this would require bandages and other too-obvious signs. Then he noticed that Andrew Sullivan insinuated that botox was involved. A cursory check of newswires suggested that Senator Kerry was busy denying that any cosmetic tweaks were involved, but it was too late -- Semantic Compositions had already seized on an idea for a phonology post.
Botox is short for "botulinum toxin", and SC can think of at least two reasons why the shorter name is used: 1) nobody would willingly inject themselves with something they were consciously thinking of as a poison, and 2) there is a phonological process in your head ready to do just this sort of "operation", without even needing any bandages.
Many languages productively form new words from phrases by truncating the individuals words and making a new word out of the leftovers. The process is quite nonrandom: each word is truncated down to a distinct phonological unit, and the resulting combination is itself constrained by having to be phonologically acceptable. In this case, the first syllable of each word is preserved, and the resulting word forms a unit known as a "foot". In case this is starting to sound like a poetry discussion to nonlinguists, that's not an accident -- the terminology was readily available, and it captures many of the phenomena studied by phonologists quite precisely.
Feet can have one, two or three syllables, depending on the language (and SC is not aware of any language that has only one foot length exclusively). However, English certainly has a strong preference for binary feet, and that's why a two-syllable word is the most natural outcome. So "botox" is more natural than, say, "botutox" or "botoxin". But what about just one syllable? Or two syllables from just one word? "bo" or "tox" would sound like an odd contraction, because no material would be coming from one of the two words in the phrase (although "bo" is certainly an acceptable English word, at least as a name). For the same reason "botu" is an unlikely choice, as it also fails to preserve part of each word.
Once you notice this going on, it's easy to spot all over the place. Semtex, the name of a particular plastic explosive, is the result of the same process being applied to "Semtin" (the Czech town where it was invented) and "explosive". Ditto for the well-known insulating fabric "Gore-tex", a combination of "Gore" (the company that makes it) and "textile".
English is hardly alone in doing this. Japanese applies the same type of process to borrowed words all the time; for example, "personal computer" becomes "pasocon" (there are changes to the sounds, as well as word length). Your host speaks only English, Spanish and Japanese, and would happily welcome examples from other languages.
On a non-linguistic note, SC wishes to observe that he is not picking on Senator Kerry; the "hook" here is only the fact that the word "botox" brought to mind certain facts about phonology. SC is a linguistics blog, not a politics blog, and your host's view of teeing off on politicians' language tics is identical to that of Mark Liberman (the same goes for physical characteristics). To put a linguistic spin on a common wisecrack, opinions are like indices -- everybody has one. When provocative issues/people/publications get mentioned here, there will always be a linguistic point to it.
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