Maybe -ula's just a little scary

Phayngula (correctly) points out that -ula sure didn't mean "scary" where it came from:

Wait a minute, this isn't right...at least to me. "-ula" is just a Latin suffix that means "little". It's a nice, friendly addition to a word that makes it small and harmless and diminutive.

I have several favorite "-ula" words:

Blastula: "little bud"
Gastrula: "little stomach"
Neurula: "little nerve"
And what about peninsula (I wonder if the etymology of that word is really what it seems to be...), scapula, fibula, formula, radula, inocula, cupula, tentacula, reticula, scrofula, nebula, trabecula, cannula, specula, rimula, navicula, Caligula (OK, that one's scary, but it just means "little boots"), arugula, carinula, insula, uvula, glomerula, frenula, Scott Bakula, and in copula?

I rather like those "-ula" words. And tarantulas are cool, too.

Semantic Compositions wishes to make clear that in no way did we mean to imply that Pharyngula is a scary person or a scary blog (it's actually quite worth a visit, both as an interesting site and as a fantastic piece of coding). SC is also quite embarrassed to realize that no actual instances of the use of "-ula" functioning as a cranberry morpheme were presented in that post. But this is another "teachable moment" ([and a learnable one for you, too, pal -- ed.]):

As SC humbly pointed out in Pharyngula's comments, one real example of "-ula" functioning as a true cranberry morpheme in English is "Count Chocula", a cereal aimed at children. "Chocula" doesn't mean "little chocolate", it's a coinage combining "choc-" (itself perhaps a cranberry morpheme in this case) and..."-ula". Clearly, the intent is to play off of "Dracula", who was a count, at least in this telling.

Other examples of "-ula" in the cranberry morpheme style? This character has coined "Bushula" in the same vein (I found it just by tagging "ula" onto Bush and putting it into Google, figuring that someone might have already done so -- however, nobody seems to have done so for Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Tom Daschle, suggesting that there are either limits to the depths of our political discourse, or I just haven't correctly intuited the spellings people would use for them). There was a series of "blaxploitation" films in the '70s, all featuring "Blacula", and the spelling variant "blackula" turns up about 2,200 hits on Google. In the same vein, I found one Google hit for "hispanicula", so it was obviously a productive suffix to someone -- again, in the "Dracula" idiom.

Although I've never read a paper that explicitly says this, I think cranberry morphemes must cluster around some very tightly defined usage. Nobody says "I had cran-turkey" to mean that they had turkey with cranberry sauce. It's only productive in the sense that "cran" combines with a bunch of other fruits to make juices, sauces, and whatever else Ocean Spray markets. So it is with "-ula" -- it's only really productive in creating terminology evocative of a famous vampire.

Pharyngula's point is well-taken, though. Borrowings don't always preserve all of their original meaning and usage in English -- if people were really accurate about keeping Latin morphology intact, we'd see a lot more cases of "datum" (13 million Google hits) relative to "data" (202 million hits). However, in particular fields of knowledge, it is not at all odd for people to be educated in Latin, Greek, or some other relevant language which the terminology is borrowed from, and to be more aware of the grammatical rules which apply. Note that most -- not all, but most -- of the terms Pharyngula cites are biology/medicine-specific terminology. It wouldn't have taken that long for the Semantic Compositions research staff to look up a few more "-ula"s and note that there are plenty more that aren't scary than ones that are. But it's also true that the links above aren't meant as "little Bush", "little black", or "little chocolate". Thanks again to Pharyngula for stimulating some interesting data collection, and for an excellent example of the sort of fact-checking and rigorous questioning that makes blogging so much fun.

Comments

[James Mesbur]

There is a very often-used apparent instance of the -ula morpheme on some baseball blogging websites: "Seligula", which refers to the present commissioner of major league baseball, Bud Selig.

This is not, of course, in reference to Dracula; rather it is comparing him to the Roman emperor Caligula, described on the link below as: "a crazed megalomaniac given to capricious cruelty and harebrained schemes."

http://www.roman-emperors.org/gaius.htm

(this evidence also shows that it is not a true use of -ula as a morpheme; rather just the sound similarity between Seligula and Caligula which led to this usage)

[dave]

...and then, while we're on the subject of Roman Emperors, there's Hadrian's poignant poem tht begins: "Animula, blandula, vagula...":

Little, gentle, wandering soul,
My body’s guest and friend,
To what far places are you borne?
Naked, cold and pale.
As the warmth and joy of life
You loved so slips away.

[R. Ullah]

As a linguistics grad student whose surname is actually pronounced "ula" (or, at least, we've Americanized it such that it now is), I read this blog post with much amusement (and a vested interest in choosing the first names for my hypothetical progeny, cf. "Drac Ullah," etc.) But seriously, on why the "-ula" morpheme doesn't seem to attach to words like Cheney or Reagan, perhaps it's a prosodic reason? The morpheme seems to attach to monosyllabic stems. Cran- morphemes are not my expertise, but it seems (unless these forms are way more productive than I'm aware of) there's a hint of the old ghost of Analogy here: the best examples of words containing the "-ula" morpheme have the closest phonological shape to Dracula and the most accessible semantics of "being Dracula-like." Of course the "Bunnicula" childrens' books and the one Google hit of "hispanicula" provide a counterexample to the phonological account, so I guess this needs more thought. And kudos, by the way, on an excellent linguistics-related blog. Too bad I didn't stumble across it earlier.

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