Being “Productive” in Linguistics
When I was younger, the prefix “mini” became popular to use with an assortment of unrelated suffixes. We had “miniskirt,” of course, but I remember “mini brain,” “minicar” and “minidress,” even “miniassignment.” My linguistics prof said that “mini” was productive.
I just ran into another word or word fragment that shows signs of becoming productive: -splain.
We have the original, “explain,” but I’ve heard “mansplain” and “mansplaining” lots of times lately. Here’s a new one:
The word is even in the title of the article.
Here’s picture of the person who wrote the article, Emily Atkin:
Productivity assumes the reader doesn’t need to get a formal definition of the new word (aka neologism) because the parts of the word are familiar.
I guess I like to be a wordsplainer.
PS—I ran into another example of productivity…
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