Quinion on 'ooglification', which was coined "about 30 years ago by Roger Wescott, who was then Professor of Linguistics at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.
It appeared in a little article in the linguistic magazine Verbatim
under the title Ooglification in American English Slang. He claimed
to have derived the word as an expansion of the American slang term
"oogly", which he said meant "extremely attractive" and "extremely
unattractive". So far as I am aware, it has never aspired to the
former sense, being a modified form of "ugly", thus being a example
of the process he describes."
"Wescott listed a number of slang terms from the past century
that share this quality. Most of his examples are either uncommon
or defunct. "Divine" has appeared as "divoon", "Scandinavian" is
known as "Scandinoovian" (sometimes as "Scandihoovian"), and at one
time "cigaroot" was a well known variation on "cigarette.""
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment