Molly Gavin's List: Morphology

• google on "Snickers" plus one of the words (especially the last)
• portmanteau
• that's not quite right, and the Playful Morphology office at LLP (which produced "Plain morphology and expressive morphology" [Berkeley Linguistics Society 13.330-40] back in 1987) is here to tell you about it
• Not really a portmanteau, but instead an extension of the noun bases eligible for combining with -ectomy, from medical ones to anything goes
• the base isn't of the Greco-Latin sort that you'd expect, so it's noticeable.  In this case, there's a fairly long tradition of such combinations in place names (based on nouns), often jocular: porkopolis, cornopolis, cottonopolis, steelopolis, and more.
• the base is from the wrong stratum of the vocabulary, and it's of the wrong category (noun rather than adjective).  Ok, that's playful morphology for you.
• The coiner on the ad campaign was probably young and knew the popular -ocity suffix;
• there's also an evolving jocular suffix -alicious (also spelled -ilicious and occasionally -elicious), conveying a high degree of some desired property, as in the (fairly widely attested) crunchalicious, crispalicious, and yummalicious (and probably others; these are just the ones I've noticed), and that might be the analysis of substantialicious
• (That 1987 BLS paper by Geoff Pullum and me
• looked at some evolving jocular suffixes that had already been discussed in the morphological literature: -orama/-rama/-ama and -eteria/-teria/-eria for shop names
• inventoried in Michael Quinion's Ologies and isms: Word beginnings and endings (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).)

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