{"id":2285,"date":"2025-01-24T11:29:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T16:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2285"},"modified":"2025-01-29T11:59:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T16:59:47","slug":"libfix-report-gler-what-learn-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/libfix-report-gler-what-learn-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Libfix report: -gler and what we can learn from it"},"content":{"rendered":"

The libfix\u00a0-gler<\/em> is an interesting case that seems to illustrate Zwicky’s hypothesis that blends lead to libfixes<\/a>. Patient zero is clearly Googler<\/em>, which is corporate’s preferred term for Google employees; it is is widely used in-group as well. This is an ordinary example of the relatively productive\u00a0-er\u00a0<\/em>suffix that creates agent nominals (backbencher<\/em>, J6er<\/em>), with a connotation that the agent does something habitually (e.g.,\u00a0pickleballer<\/em>) or as an occupation (cartographer<\/em>). That a Googler<\/em> is someone who works at Google, and not just a habitual user of the search engine, is slightly notable but not shocking.<\/p>\n

The next best-established forms look more like blends based on\u00a0Googler<\/em>. First and most saliently, there is noogler <\/em><\/a>‘new Google employee’, where the word-onset has been replaced to create a blend with\u00a0new<\/em>. Members of an official affiliational group (\/listserv) for Jewish Googlers call themselves Jewglers<\/em>, with a similar single-phoneme substitution. Since both new<\/em> and\u00a0Jew<\/em> share the \/Cu\u02d0-\/ initial of\u00a0Google<\/em>(r<\/em>)\u2014the only adaptation is changing the place and manner of the initial C\u2014this still looks like blending rather than recutting<\/a>.\u00a0Xoogler<\/a> <\/em>‘former employee of Google’ is presumably pronounced ex-oogler\u00a0<\/em>(I’ve never heard it said out loud myself); the term is commonly used by entrepeneurs in their fund-raising (cf. xoogler.co<\/a>); this could be a blend or just regarded as a one-off truncation of\u00a0ex-Googler<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cats and cows (and ball pythons<\/a>) are not permitted at Google’s offices, but I have seen mewgler <\/em>and\u00a0moogler\u00a0<\/em>for cat- and cow fancier Google employees. However, Googlers are permitted to bring their (well-behaved, vaccinated) dogs to work, and employees who do so call themselves dooglers<\/em>. (Then again, my colleague LeeAnn says the dogs themselves are the dooglers<\/em>!) My intuition is that this is pronounced [du\u02d0.gl\u025a]\u00a0and not *[d\u0252.gl\u025a], and thus this is less blend-like than any of the aforementioned examples, because dog<\/em> and the base Googler<\/em> have a different vowel (albeit both back vowels). The same is true for\u00a0Zoogler<\/em><\/a> for Google employees based out of the Zurich office since the first vowel in the US English pronunciation of Zurich<\/em> is [\u028a], and even we get a seemingly more dissimilar-to-base front-gliding diphthong in gaygler<\/em><\/a>, the term for members of the company-internal LGBT affiliation group (\/listserv).<\/p>\n

In my analysis, doogler<\/em>,\u00a0Zoogler<\/em> and\u00a0gaygler <\/em>strongly suggest that we have gone from a blend with Googler<\/em> as its base to an incipient liberated affix\u00a0-gler<\/em> denoting agents associated with Google.<\/p>\n

The biggest puzzle about English libfixes, for me, one not answered in any of the prior work, is why the recutting occurs where it does. It is perhaps not surprising that the rather-homophonous -er<\/em> has not been given yet another sense, but why is it\u00a0-gler<\/em> and not\u00a0-0ogler <\/em>(which would give us the not-preposterous, but unattested *gayoogler<\/em>)\u00a0or\u00a0-ler <\/em>(*gayler<\/em>)? While Zwicky’s cline hypothesis does not answer this, here is one possible way to operational this: recutting is blend reanalysis, with the source morphemes like new<\/em> and J<\/em>ew are parsed maximally in noogler <\/em>and Jewgler, <\/em>with the remainder giving us the new affix\u00a0-gler<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I know of many other libfixes consistent with this analysis. For example, from the blend fursona\u00a0<\/em>(fur +\u00a0persona<\/em>) we have –sona\u00a0<\/em>(e.g., catsona<\/em>, puppysona<\/em>); from glitterat<\/em>i<\/em> (glitter<\/em> + literati<\/em>) we have\u00a0-rati<\/em> (e.g., Twitterati<\/em>,\u00a0technorati<\/em>), from\u00a0funtastic<\/em> (fun<\/em> + fantastic<\/em>) we have\u00a0-tastic\u00a0<\/em>(e.g.,\u00a0chavtastic, shagtastic<\/em>), from\u00a0telethon<\/em> (telephone\u00a0<\/em>+\u00a0<\/em>marathon) <\/em>we have -(a)thon<\/em> (e.g.,\u00a0saleathon<\/em>, mathathon<\/em>).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This is of course not the full story. Most other libfixes in my corpus seem to arise at a prexisting morpheme boundary, with one or the other piece reinterpreted as a productive affix with new lexical semantics based on the full form. Some examples include\u00a0cran-<\/em> from cranberry <\/em>(e.g., crantini<\/em>),\u00a0-gate<\/em> from\u00a0Watergate<\/em> (e.g.,\u00a0Troopergate<\/em>),\u00a0-mare\u00a0<\/em>from\u00a0nightmare\u00a0<\/em>(e.g., editmare<\/em>), and\u00a0-berg<\/em> from\u00a0iceberg\u00a0<\/em>(e.g.,\u00a0fatberg<\/em>). In many cases, the morpheme boundaries are abstract ones mirroring the segmentation of Latin or Greek\u00a0 complex word borrowings as in -(i)verse <\/em>from the Latin-based universe <\/em>(e.g., Buffyverse<\/em>)\u00a0or\u00a0-(o)nomics <\/em>from the Greek-based economics\u00a0<\/em>(e.g., the brand name Chemonomics<\/em>). My corpus also includes Franken<\/em>– from the German compound name Franken-stein <\/em>(e.g.\u00a0Frankenfood<\/em>) and -nik<\/em> from the Russian derivative s-put-nik<\/em> (e.g., peacenik<\/em>). In the above cases, the segmentation is more or less the same as in the donor language.<\/p>\n

In other cases, though, the segmentation is different than that in the donor language, as in -ohol<\/em>(ic<\/em>) ultimately from Arabic, which retain a little less of the base than one might expect (here al-<\/em> is the Arabic definite prefix), and -copter <\/em>from neo-Greek and -nado<\/em> from Spanish, which both retain a little more. While I don’t think it’s that controversial to posit that cranberry<\/em>, economics<\/em> or universe <\/i>are represented as complex nouns (our understanding of the morphophonology of English seems to depend on this conclusion, and virtually all behavioral research on word processing supports this), it is perhaps not shocking that ordinary English speakers are unfamiliar with the morphology of the etyma of alcohol<\/em>,\u00a0helicopter<\/em>, and tornado <\/em>in the ultimate donor languages. These more ad-hoc recuttings don’t necessarily line up with syllable boundaries\u2014though hypothetical *-cohol\u00a0<\/em>or *-ler<\/em> would have\u2014so I suspect there is just some inherent stochasticity to how this final type of recutting proceeds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The libfix\u00a0-gler is an interesting case that seems to illustrate Zwicky’s hypothesis that blends lead to libfixes. Patient zero is clearly Googler, which is corporate’s preferred term for Google employees; it is is widely used in-group as well. This is an ordinary example of the relatively productive\u00a0-er\u00a0suffix that creates agent nominals (backbencher, J6er), with a … Continue reading “Libfix report: -gler and what we can learn from it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-libfixes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2285"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2292,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions\/2292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}