Word: suffixes
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...right to spend all their time lolling in cafes thinking up fresh words: all those spanking new particles and objects have to be called something. But the sewage of cultural theory and philosophy is a pernicious influence, taking your average happy noun ('problem'), and disfiguring it with a meaningless suffix. Take a few more such words; apply prefixes at will; stir boldly for a decade; before long, an entire generation will have on its tongues an assortment of unaesthetic and utterly meaningless words. And there, comrades, lies the rub. Their complete uselessness means everyone will use them--simply for want...
...only to the gradual separation of the hemispheres of our brains, and an aching descent into complete madness. For they all say the same: we are what we speak; our language--its metaphors, implicit value judgments--inform our personalities. Caught between the Scylla of cliche and the Charybdis of suffix, our future personalities cannot but disintegrate into a stewing pot of confusion, from which we yearn to return to the wordlessness of the womb...
...civil rights movement, and then the environment, women's reproductive rights, health legislation, the educational crisis. But now they too face dilution by a trivialized sense of civic responsibility. What are your politics? Oh, I'm antismoking. And yours? Why, I'm starting an action committee to have the suffix -man removed from every word in every book in the Library of Congress. And yours, sir? Well, God told me to chain myself to a fire hydrant until we put a fetus on the Supreme Court...
...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...