Tuesday, June 07, 2005
On Language 6/7: My wife’s words
In a changing world of words, you say potato, I say potatoest
Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Here are some of the words and phrases I first heard from my wife, Andrea. Given this level of inventiveness displayed by one person, is it any wonder that language as a whole changes and evolves as much as it does?
Analyzation: combination of “analysis” and “rationalization,” connoting excess, as in, “Don’t ruin the movie with your analyzations.”
Of my three favorite dictionaries, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (MWC) and the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) list “analyzation” as a variant of “analysis,” while the newly released second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) doesn’t have it (though it does have “analyzable”).
A Google search yields about 700 examples of the word. A quick scan of these results suggests the word usually uses a prefix to connote excess, as in “over-analyzations” and “hyper-analyzations.”
Wait Till 1904!
The ASD-L folk are antedating “wait till next year!”
Washington Post, Sep 29, 1903, p. 8
The Senators could do nothing in the next two innings.
“Wait till next year.”
——-
Washington Post, Oct 7, 1906, p. S1
BASEBALL YEAR ENDS ... Manager Stahl Again Speaks of Washington Club’s
Success—Says Team Received Splendid Support, and Winds Up with “Wait
Until Next Year.”
...
And with a smile, the Senators’ manager sprung the old gag: “Wait until
next year.”
——-
(The hapless Senators would eventually win the World Series in 1924, plus
two more pennants in 1925 and 1933. And now Washington finally has a
first-place team again!)—Ben Zimmer