Word: suffixes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anything that departs from the center; weird, by comparison, has its mongrel origins in the Old English wyrd, meaning fate or destiny; and the larger, darker forces conjured up by the term -- Macbeth's weird sisters and the like -- are given an extra twist with the slangy, bastard suffix -o. Beneath the linguistic roots, however, we feel the difference on our pulses. The eccentric we generally regard as something of a donny, dotty, harmless type, like the British peer who threw over his Cambridge fellowship in order to live in a bath. The weirdo is an altogether more shadowy figure...
...explosive growth. RHD-II contains 50,000 new entries, most of them words that have come into use since 1966. The field of business and finance has contributed its share (greenmail, golden parachute), as have science and technology (string theory, user friendly), government (disinformation, -gate as an all-purpose suffix for scandals), social trends (yuppie, underclass) and relations between the sexes (significant other, palimony...
...Reagan Administration copes with its burgeoning scandal, pundits are + facing a minor but nonetheless sticky problem of their own: what to call it. Ever since Watergate, the suffix -gate has been used to label virtually any hint of governmental wrongdoing (from the Koreagate bribery scandal to Lancegate, the flap over President Carter's former Budget Director). News of secret U.S. arms shipments to Iran was initially dubbed, unsurprisingly, Irangate. But as the scandal has broadened, the nicknames have multiplied: Armsgate, Contragate, Budgate (for McFarlane), Northgate (for Oliver...
Everyone's second favorite suffix, -scam, as in Abscam, has also had a heavy workout (Iranscam, or the rather infelicitous NSCam), as have various "connections" (the Contra Connection, the Swiss Connection, the Tehran Connection). More whimsical designations usually focus on the scandal's most intriguing character: Ollie's Follies, Oliver's Twist, Cuckoo Iran and Ollie, and even (for fans of '50s rock 'n' roll) the Buddy-Ollie Story. Reagan's foes have played the name game with partisan glee: Dutch's Clutch, Gippergate, Iranaround, Iranoutaluck . . . well, you get the idea...
...term little dog, and the Germans, little treasure. Littleness is the key to many of these expressions. For some reason the tendency in the language of love is to make less of the object of one's affections; it is quite common in most languages to add a diminutive suffix to a name (in Russian, ya, in Greek, oula, in Irish, een) so as to express fond feelings. Psychologists might suggest that the purpose of these diminutions is to assert the superiority of lover to loved one ("my pet"), but the effect diminishes all parties. We have created these words...