One interesting thing about the “-aholic” splinter is that it contains a suffix itself ("-ic"). One might expect that, if an alcoholic is someone who is addicted to alcohol, the word for someone addicted to work would be “workic,” not “workaholic.” It’s possible that “-aholic” came into use instead of “-ic” for this meaning because the latter already had a meaning (“pertaining to”).
The “-ic” suffix transforms a noun to an adjective. For example, in the word “Icelandic” it changes the noun “Iceland” to an adjective meaning “of or pertaining to Iceland.” It retains this meaning (or something like it) in the other common meaning of “alcoholic.” An alcoholic beverage is not a beverage that drinks too much.
The “-aholic” suffix comes from a word that changed from one part of speech to another. “Alcoholic” was originally an adjective. As so commonly happens in English, people started using it as a noun. Maybe this has something to do with why people use the “-aholic” splinter instead of the “-ic” suffix for this purpose. “-Aholic” changes a noun into another noun (i.e. it doesn’t change parts of speech).
A year or two back we had some antique roses cut down, and the guy doing it named a particularly dangerous one “Thornzilla.”
(BTW, cutting old roses down is good for them. In a couple of months, one was as tall as I am, very full, and starting to bloom. Thornzilla and the others were not far behind.)
Are you sure you’re not confusing this with “-ati”, based on “literati”, as I mentioned above?
“-ati” means roughly “the leading members of a given clique or society”.
I haven’t heard “Twitterazzi”, but I can see it could be applied to Twitter stalkers. “Twitterati” is a fairly common one, meaning celeb tweeters in general.
I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the practice (by some) of adding “itis” to a word in a colloquial sense to denote some pathology or excess associated with the root word.
Examples include ‘senioritis’ and “wiitis”. There must be more, but damned if I can think of them just now.
“Mc” from “McDonalds,” as in McJob: "…slang for a low-paying, low-prestige dead end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement.[1] The term McJob comes from the name of the fast-food restaurant McDonald’s, but is used to describe any low-status job — regardless of the employer — where little training is required, staff turnover is high, and workers’ activities are tightly regulated by managers. (wiki)
Words like morpheme, tmesis, affix just never come up at the lunchroom table.