The Black Family Weblog

Warning: The following post may cause discomfort, confusion, generalized sadness, or heartburn to the grammatically oppressed. Reader discretion is advised.

To elaborate on the practice that I’m delighted to find William adopting as described in previous post:

Using prefixes and suffixes in a way that is conceptually accurate (location, general meaning, etc.) but with root words they have no business attaching to gives me a strange blended sense of happiness and pandemonium (happimonium? pandeness? happy pandas? erm, something like that…). And it provides the added bonus of reckless disregard for a widely agreed upon social construct in a relatively harmless way. Provided that my humorlessier (i.e., those with a diminished sense of humor) high school English teachers are not within earshot.

Then there’s the beauty of blending two words together to make a shorter one that is intended to express the same idea as the longer version (ref. happimonium, pandeness above). I employ this professionally on a regular basis, to the amusement of my coworkers and chagrin of my superiors, who I think are just afraid I’ll contractionize in front of a client. And I most likely will, but only around the ones who are likely to think, “Did she just say…? Nah…” Not to mention that it reminds me of this exceptionally diggable episode of Electric Company where Bill Cosby sang The Sneaver Song.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG-gag6Q1vY[/video]

Go on, give it a clickity. :)