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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

"Thingyness"

By The Daily Dish
Oct 15 2007, 8:23 AM ET

Or the power of the Colbert suffix:

It's Colbert’s non-virtuous sense of the -y suffixand his new meaning of “truthy” as not truthy at allthat’s inspired some recently coined words, demonstrating what the Stanford University linguist Arnold Zwicky has called the Colbert suffix. The most notable case is probably "fame-iness," a type of devalued, insubstantial fame epitomized by Paris Hilton and discussed by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Zwicky has also found examples of "referenciness" (a quality possessed by writing that appears to contain solid references, but upon closer examination, those sources are actually bogus or beside the point) and “faithy-ness” (an insincere pretense to religious faith, endemic to politicians). Elsewhere, I’ve spotted “democraciness,” “innocentiness,” “integritiness,” “intelligentiness,” “outraginess,” “victoriness,” and “youthiness,” all of which have the Colbert flavor.

The Times Literary Supplement just had a story on the "The Thinginess of History."



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