The Neo-Pseudo-Suffix '-eroo

IN CERTAIN circles-notably radio, sports, advertising, and motion pictures-one often does not pay the check, take a dive, tell a joke, or listen to swing music. Instead he pays the checkeroo, takes a diveroo, tells a jokeroo, and listens to swingaroo. Do such terms as these merely end with meaningless extra syllables? Sometimes they do, but not always. There is a perceptible semantic variation between the new forms with tails and the old acaudate ones. That is, it may not be quite so jarring to the playwright's sensibilities to read that his work is a flopperoo as to read that it is-tersely, bluntly, rudely-a flop. And the hapless sapperoo or bummaroo seems somehow less so than he used to be before the suffixion. Common as such new words are, little has been written about them.l Some fifty have come to my attention; no special search was made in the numerous likely sources particularized below. The eye, it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear stop listening to the radio. And nearly thirty, or about a third of all the quotations below, were heard on the radio

Linguistics · Suffix · Lexicography and Language Studies · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · History · Philosophy

• Hasta La Vista, Baby

  Open Access•Jane H Hill•Critique of Anthropology•1993

  Add to list

• A group of late Saxon brooches

  Open Access•Vera I Evison•The Antiquaries Journal•1957

  Add to list

• Seventy-Five Years among the New Words

  Benjamin Zimmer, Charles E Carson et al.•American Speech•2016

  Add to list