Today I was trying to find the word that meant the opposite of ‘append’, as in “I appended the sentence XYZ to the end of the third paragraph on page 67.”.
“Aha!” I said, “It’s the cool semi-obscure and geeky word ‘prepend’.”
[…]
“Waitaminit. If it is, how come OED isn’t spitting up the right definition at all, and Word doesn’t recognize it? If it’s not, then what’s the real word?”
Thesauruses online yielded no bounty. Finally I gave up and asked a local IRC channel what the answer was.
“Prefix?”
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Which leads me to my real question – what do you call it when people make up words that sound like they SHOULD be right, but aren’t? I figured prepend was the right word because hey, Latin etymological roots. Revisionist grammarfascism? This is another term that I should know, and probably do, but can’t find in the jumble that passes for my brain these days.
Back formation? That tends to be used to describe the origins of words (“Port Out/Starboard Home”, “Fornication Under Consent of the king”) rather than words like “prepend”, buit it might fit.
Those aren’t back formations. They’re just false etymologies. They happen to both be false acronymic etymologies, but that has nothing to do with back formation. Back formation involves things like removal of a real or imagined suffix to create a word that didn’t exist before.
I slouch corrected. I seem to have misunderstood the definition of “back formation”, which isn’t all that surprising. Out of curiousity, can you give an example of a back formation? I’m having problems thinking of a word that fits that definition.
Back formation sounds like the term that I was looking for, except with a prefix in this particular case, not a suffix.
Squink – well, slap me and call me Sally. I’ve heard it used so often around me that I was wondering what was going on when more reputable resources were refusing to acknowledge my understanding of the term. The Jargon File is The Answer!
Another back-formation is the verb “lase”. “Laser” is an acronym, being “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”. But most words in English which end in -er are formed from a verb, so it’s easy to suppose that a laser is a thing which lases. So we get the verb “to lase”, meaning “to do what a laser does”.
I think it can be considered a form of analogy (back formation is also analogy).
Analogy (in linguistic terms, at least) is the use of phonological or morphological forms on the basis of their similarities to other existing forms.
My favorite is the plural of octopus , a Greek borrowing, whose plural form should be something like octopodes , but through analogy to other words ending in -us, borrowed from Latin, we get octopi . Or the other accepted plural form of octopuses , of course, is through analogy to the most common English plural morpheme.
There was this vegetable commonly known as pease. A plateful of these small green things would be called pease. Even a single one would be called pease. However, people thought that the singular of pease would be pea.
And I think that’s what happened with prepend. It’s now a valid word in my view, meaning I know what it means and I have no problems using it in my own work. I’m apparently far from the only one to feel this way. If the OED and the AHD haven’t caught up yet, tough noogies.
A term neatly fossilized in the old poem “Pease porridge hot/Pease porridge cold/Pease porridge in the pot nine days old.”
That’s interesting, and octopodes is a cool word.
And the verb “mase” from maser, which comes from ‘Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’.
I’ve heard it used so often around me that I was wondering what was going on when more reputable resources were refusing to acknowledge my understanding of the term. The Jargon File is The Answer!