[CW: distasteful ideologies.]<\/p>\n
A student at CUNY, Emily Campbell, recently brought two libfixes to my attention.<\/p>\n
The first is -pire<\/em>,\u00a0presumably extracted from\u00a0empire<\/em> and found in the blend\u00a0Fempire (<\/em>an “investment cooperative for FIERCE women”) and in\u00a0Trumpire<\/em>, presumably a pejorative meaning something like ‘the world of the Trump family’. Both of these look blend-like in that the base provides a \/m\/.<\/p>\n In looking for more examples I also discovered a bunch of brand names in -spire<\/em>, a libfix that appears to have been extracted from\u00a0inspire.\u00a0<\/em>There is\u00a0Artspire<\/em>, an art festival,\u00a0CitySpire<\/em>, a New York City skyscraper which is more of a dome than a spire<\/em> (n.), and the tech companies\u00a0Fundspire<\/em>,\u00a0Jobspire<\/em>,\u00a0Pinspire<\/em>, and\u00a0WeSpire<\/em>.<\/p>\n A linguistically more interesting example is -cuck<\/em>. This originates in\u00a0cuckold<\/em>, an archaic pejorative referring to the husband of an adulterous woman. How did a (string) prefix become a suffix? Here’s my best guess. First,\u00a0cuckold<\/em> obtains a new and more transgressive sense as the name for a genre of pornography in which a (usually white) man is forced to watch as a straight man (usually non-white) has sex with his (usually white) wife or girlfriend. This new racist sense lead to the blend\u00a0cuckservative<\/em>, a pejorative for white conservative Western politicians perceived to have betrayed their race (and perhaps also their donor base). While we might expect this would lead to a prefixal reanalysis (and a new libfix *cuck<\/em>-), what seems to have happened first is\u00a0cuck<\/em> was made into a free stem. In informal usage, to\u00a0cuck<\/em> (v.) is to embarass, or more specifically emasculate, someone, and a\u00a0cuck<\/em> (n.) is someone perceived to be acting against their interests or the interests of their in-group; a class-, race-, or gender-traitor (though a conservative belief system is not necessarily presupposed).\u00a0It didn’t take long before conservative politicians started using that one on each other<\/a>. Later, with the fossilization of the\u00a0incel\u00a0<\/em><\/a>narrative, we find the suffixal form\u00a0-cuck<\/em> as in words like\u00a0wagecuck<\/em> ‘wage-slave’\u00a0(“whadda schnook!”, I guess),\u00a0Eurocuck<\/em>,\u00a0normcuck<\/em>, or\u00a0studycuck<\/em>, all pejorative (though not necessarily racist).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [CW: distasteful ideologies.] A student at CUNY, Emily Campbell, recently brought two libfixes to my attention. The first is -pire,\u00a0presumably extracted from\u00a0empire and found in the blend\u00a0Fempire (an “investment cooperative for FIERCE women”) and in\u00a0Trumpire, presumably a pejorative meaning something like ‘the world of the Trump family’. Both of these look blend-like in that the … Continue reading “The libfixes -pire, -spire, and -cuck”<\/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":[4,26,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-libfixes","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","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=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}