Semantic Compositions

A blog-a-rific post

In the interests of not making every post here about media bias this week, and keeping with the nascent SC tradition (anything less than a year old just doesn't really seem to merit the t-word) of blogging about fast-food language, your host will mention a sign seen tonight at Jack-In-The-Box:

Aroma-licious! Bean-tastic! Java-rific! Coffee so good, we had to make up new words for it.

Since these aren't really morphemes on their own (cran, cran, cran, cran...), SC couldn't resist trying out the endings to see how readily they were adopted by other people. As usual, all hit counts are Google's, the second-favorite search engine of SC (his favorite remains the one he helped design, even if it never made it out of the lab).

"rific": about 25,000 hits, including such gems as ""Tour-rific", "Spa-rific", "Tigger-rific", and "Tea-rific". "Tour" and "tea" work particularly well in this case, for obvious reasons. Your host was only mildly surprised to learn that "rrific" with two "r"s is nowhere near as popular (about 3,000 hits); although "ter" isn't a morpheme, either, and he might have expected the double consonant to be carried over to parallel the appearance of "terrific", we don't start many words with two of the same consonant (the British name ffolkes being a rare exception, and the name of a very funny movie).

"tastic" is far more popular than "rific", pulling in some 130,000 hits. This is true even when you pull out the too-easy pun "fun-tastic" (also minus "fan-tastic with a '-'), with 91,000 hits. Inspection of the first few pages of results indicate that pornographers seem to have a special affection for "tastic", a fact which I cannot explain and don't care to try.

"licious" turns out to be as popular as "tastic". It comes in with fewer hits in isolation; only about 114,000. But if you pull out the most obvious hit again, "dee-licious", you get as many hits as "tastic". Unsurprisingly, it finds use primarily in food descriptions; "pawlicious" for a line of dog snacks, "maui-licious" barbeque sauce, and "vegan-licious" (a vegan cookbook) were typical results.

Searching for morphemes like this presents a special problem. The results above all depended on people singling out the usage they were coining by using a space or hyphen between the stem and the affix in question. If someone wrote "mauilicious", though, it would skip right by Google. So the above estimates are only a very rough guide to the productivity of the morphemes involved, although it's hard to believe that the relative frequencies would change all that much.

SC really likes these constructions. Coinages of this sort represent a search for something which is not merely a superlative, but conveys excitement and enthusiasm as well. Yes, it's easy for them to be trite and cheap; there's a reason the "tastic" count went down so spectacularly without the two most obvious variations. And writing like this in serious genres would come off stylistically as more juvenile than clever. Still, in appropriate contexts, these words are good for at least a fleeting smile and a brighter mood, and it's not too often you can get that from just one word anywhere.

Find me a "ster"

Yesterday, while browsing a Jewish cultural site, SC noticed an ad for a website called "Frumster" ("frum" is a Yiddish word meaning a very religious person). The site bills itself as "the dating service exclusively for Orthodox Jewish singles worldwide" (emphasis in original).

The name Frumster is just one more in a series of "-ster"s beginning with the original, Napster. There are plenty of others, including Grokster and Friendster. Thanks to Napster and those who have followed in its path, "-ster" looks like it's become a cranberry morpheme with a meaning along the lines of "thing for finding something, possibly (but not necessarily) what it's attached to". It's not always compositional -- Napster doesn't help you find a place to nap, and Grokster doesn't help you grok anything, but Friendster definitely is intended to help you find friends. As further evidence that people use it productively, SC was able to find coinages of "carster" and even "warezster" (perhaps surprisingly, no such site actually exists, although it would be the target of massive lawsuits if it did).

Of course, since Napster's momentum was stopped cold, "-ster" may not have much life left in it. Most of the coinages above are from 2000 or 2001; new "-sters", particularly successful ones, are hard to come by. Maybe the next big one is really going to be "-gle", with a meaning not unlike the one "-ster" was working on acquiring. Google has already introduced "Froogle", and H.P. Lovecraft fans will be delighted to learn about "Cthuugle" (which SC is grateful to Uncle Jazzbeau for coming across; he didn't mention it, but they've got a great error message for searches that come up empty). Your host failed to successfully guess any other words that "-gle" had been tacked onto to describe a search engine for something, so perhaps it won't really catch on.

Proclaiming something to be a cranberry morpheme probably requires it to have a bit more stability within common vocabulary than just being "meme-of-the-moment". "-ula" is productive in part because Dracula is well-known and has been for a long time. And "cran-" has had millions in marketing dollars behind it for many years. Maybe the closest thing that the computer science field has to a cranberry morpheme with this kind of stability and popularity is "-soft", whose owner I won't bother linking to (since they decided not too long ago that they didn't want a follow-up interview with SC; perhaps they know that he was about the last person to give up on OS/2 at home).

The X-nator

Yesterday, Mrs. SC introduced your host to an online cartoon she thought he'd like, Homestar Runner. Her favorite was something involving a dragon called "Trogdor the Burninator". SC didn't actually like it all that much, but noticed something: -nator is a cranberry morpheme.

The evidence?

There's the original Terminator, which is the "cranberry" that "nator" is pulled off of. Then there's its update for Arnold Schwarzenegger's nickname these days, the Governator. SC particularly likes the one about Governator beer, although he wouldn't go to the trouble of ordering it if it's not in his grocery store. Searching for just plain old "nator" turned up some other clear derivations, like "grease-o-nator" for a cleaning product, and "carb-o-nator", not someting for carbonating soft drinks, but rather a delivery service for Atkins diet-type foods. There's even an Indian cricket player known as the "Dravid-nator". SC has made several good-faith efforts to understand cricket, but has long since quit, and cannot understand how a nickname with lethal overtones can be applied to any player, no matter how good, of such a slow-moving game.

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.

"Cranberry morphemes", and the case of -ula

Rhosgobel has been carrying on a discussion with a gentleman who goes by Pharyngula. This is not about that discussion.

Not being a biologist, Semantic Compositions had no idea what a pharyngula is. (The answer can be found here.) However, SC's first instinct was that it must be something dark and scary. Why?

Well, what ends in -ula?

Dracula and tarantula are all that come to mind.

Of course, "ula" isn't a word. But given a couple of examples, it starts to look like there's a paradigm (an apparently productive linguistic rule for conjugating words into new forms). Maybe "ula" isn't a word, but the ending "-ula" can be attached to something to mean "scary". This is actually a well-known linguistic phenomenon (well-known to linguists, that is), called a "cranberry morpheme".

A morpheme is an independently meaningful string, which is not necessarily a word in and of itself (many linguists would quibble with this definition, but hey, this is Pop Linguistics). Now, the "boysen" in "boysenberry" is actually someone's last name -- go to your grocery store and hit the jelly aisle if you don't believe me. But there's no "cran". There are, however, a variety of "cran" words which have succeeded "cranberry". Like "cran-raspberry" or "cran-grape". So "cran" appears to be productively affixable to other words to form new ones (at least if you speak Marketing, an offshoot of English). Thus, the "cranberry morpheme", an item like "cran" which attaches to other things to form new words, even though it's not a word itself.

Cranberry Morphology is a potentially rich source of humor, so this may become a running feature.