The curious case of -pilled

A correspondent asks whether –pilled is a libfix. I note grillpilled (when you stop caring about politics and focus on cooking meat outdoors) and catpilled (when you get toxoplasmosis). While writing this, I was wondering whether anyone has declared themselves tennispilled; yes, someone has.

The etymology of -pilled seems clear enough. The phrase taking the {blue, red} pill from that scene in The Matrix (1998) gave rise to the idiomatic compounds blue pill and red pill. These then underwent zero derivation, giving us bluepilled and (especially) redpilled. The most common syntactic function for these two words seems to be as a sort of perfective adjective, possibly with an agentive by-phrase (e.g., “I was redpilled by Donald Trump Jr.’s IG”), but I also recognize a construction where the agent has been promoted to subject position and the object is the benefactor (e.g., “Donald Trump Jr.’s IG redpilled me”).

The thing though, is that –pilled derives from two idiomatic compounds and still has the form of an English past participle. There is no clear evidence of recutting, just a new reading for the zero-derived pill plus the past participle marker –ed. It is thus much like other non-exactly-libfixes like –core (< hardcore) and –gate (< Watergate), in my estimation.

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