Andrew Sullivan does infixation

SC readers know that Andrew Sullivan is often a source of material (here, here, and most recently, here). Your host tries to avoid discussing Mr. Sullivan's (he's entitled to Dr., but SC hasn't seen him insist on it) views in this forum; our purposes here are largely linguistic. This one's a beaut.

In his latest article for the Sunday Times of London, AS attributes a coinage to Mickey Kaus:

Here's a word that deserves to be entered into the political lexicon. The blogger Mickey Kaus coined it. It's "pandescender."

As Mr. Sullivan explains it, the word is a combination of "pander" and "condescend", and is a verb meaning to simultaneously pander and condescend. In the usages of both Sullivan and Kaus, it accepts the suffix "-er" to derive the noun "pandescenderer", meaning "someone who both panders and condescends". Since the plain verb form contains the string "-er" itself, we must assume that it derives from one of the words that was used to make the compound, and thus that Mickey Kaus' grammar (and Andrew Sullivan's, since this doesn't bother him) features a productive infixation rule, like so:

pander + condescend -> pan- + descend + -der -> pandescendder

Since English does not generally permit geminate (for nonlinguists, "long") consonants, we may also assume that some phonological process reduces the output of the rule to "pandescender".

Now, it is true that most English speakers actually allow at least some infixation, even though it's not taught in schools. SC still remembers his very first linguistics class, where the professor demonstrated this fact by uttering "in-f***ing-credible". Let's see if we can take a stab at characterizing the morphological process that allows this (note: the following analysis is less serious than SC's usual standards of rigor, such as they are).

Note that in both cases, the infixed word is inserted after the first syllable of the infixed word. So there's a positional effect. It's hard to identify a clear phonological rule; while place of articulation remains stable at the infixation point for "pandescend", there is no common phonological feature at the junction of "in" and "f***". So maybe it's just a positional issue. Let's try a few new coinages, trying to keep things in the same domain of lexical semantics to eliminate effects there:

Based on the obliviousness of the average cell-phone user to the outside world, how about "chatter" and "ignore"? "chatignorter". Maybe just "chatignorer". Or maybe "igchatternore". The first two sound too much like someone in the process of ignoring a chat, which is the one thing cell-phone users don't do; meanwhile "igchatternore" has a certain onomatopoeic quality to it that your host rather likes. It sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of someone not paying attention.

Or perhaps from the combination of "mobilize" (which Merriam-Webster gives as a synonym for "drive") and "imprecate" (a nice way of saying "curse"), we can fashion a useful description of what people do while stuck on freeways during rush hour. "moimprecatebilize" probably violates most people's intuitions about the sounds of English, never mind the grammar, but "immobilizeprecate" felicitously adds the sense of being immobilized.

It seems abundantly clear to your host that infixation is actually capable of being a quite productive phenomenon in English. Unlike other languages, which make use of morphemes with well-defined syntactic and semantic properties to perform infixation, it only really serves to create compound words, perhaps in a more emphatic manner than merely joining them end-to-end. SC rather likes this idea, and will continue to try his hand at inblatherfixating.

(Edited to correct spelling of "pandescender", as per reader Russell's comment, at 5:46 a.m. on 3/8/04)

Comments

[Russell]

Pardon the ignorant comments of an undergraduate.

First, perhaps it's just a typo on your part, but the word in question is pandescender, not pancondescender.

Second, there seems to be some confusion about the exact form of this new word. I could only find this page where Mickey Kaus uses the word, and it seems to be as a noun, meaning that "pandescenderer" might be illformed (as illformed as such new words can be, anyway). If this is the case, I'm not sure that you need to call this infixation. I think it patterns like such lovely words as

abs(olute(ly)) + (pos)itively = absitively
(Because there is no form *absitive or I take it that the -ly is not part of an adj->adv derivation)
Or the just-made
gnar(ly) + (ra)dical = gnardical (this also reduces the confusion caused by having both elements take -ly endings)

Then we would have

pan(der(er)) + (con)descender = pandescender.

You could still reanalyze it as infixation, but because I haven't seen the verb "pandescend," it seems less desirable, to me anyway.

OTOH, if pandescenderer is grammatical, then infixation looks much better.

[Semantic Compositions]

First, thanks for catching my typo. I wrote it correctly in the first place after I pasted in the quote, but did it incorrectly thereafter. Since it didn't change the nature of the analysis all that much (although I don't have a story about what happens to the "con"), I've edited the typo and given notice.

As for the usage: I didn't actually check Mickey Kaus' writing; I just went off of Andrew Sullivan's reporting of it. Since he wrote the word in question as "pandescenderer" and used it as a noun in the title of the article (it doesn't even actually appear in the body), but just wrote "pandescender" in the article itself, I assumed that the "one -er" form was a verb, and the "two -er" form was thus a derived noun.

If Sullivan has indeed misreported Kaus' usage, then your analysis is, of course, correct -- and no infixation needs to be stipulated. I think that I've got the facts right within the context of Sullivan's article alone, but then again, this wouldn't be the first time I've stolen a base for the sake of trying to be funny.

[NW]

I'd guess one or the other of them just got confused about nouns and verbs and it didn't occur to them there were two -er morphemes to think about. Having coined pandescend verb and/or pandescender agent noun, they notice that the latter contains pander and therefore looks like a blend so might be the verb. You and I would have to decide which it was; a non-linguist wouldn't.

Or possibly it's a reanalysis of pan- as a universal -- all-pandering --, so you omit the less important of two prefixes when you combine them.

[Cristi]

i learned that words were infixed after the strongest syllable in the surrounding word. my professor's example was "missi-fucking-ssippi", so 'moimprecatebilize' works, (though i'm kind of partial to 'immobilizeprecate').

[PlacidPundit]

My problem is that, upon seeing "pandescender" in print, I parse it as pan (all) descender (one who descends) and immediately picture someone who is willing to descend in any situation.

[Лингвистический портал]

You are absolutely right about the "pandescender". And according to Google "pandescenderer" has grown even more popular than "pandescender". I wonder why.

[Name]

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[Deonte]

The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
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[Name]

The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
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[Name]

The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
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[Avery]

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[Kendal]

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[thenorthface2012]

sitting in the conference room waiting for me to do Company. I wore short-sleeved shirt to go, a door to feel particularly depressed