All the words in -cade seem to have been suggested by cavalcade, which is a loan from the French and is traced by the NED, in English use, to 1591. Its true suffix is not -cade but -ade. The latter got into French in loan-words from the Southwestern Romance languages, and many of the words embodying it subsequently passed into English, e.g., accolade, ambuscade, arcade, balustrade, brigade, cannonade, esplanade, marmalade, parade and serenade. But lemonade, which the NED traces to 1663, was apparently taken into English direct from the Spanish; in fact, it seems to have been preceded by lemonado, a plain imitation of the Spanish limonada. Motorcade was first reported in Notes- and Queries in 1924.1 A year later it was noted by Modern Language Notes,2 but for a while it seems to have made progress only slowly. By 1930, however, an anonymous correspondent of American Speech was sending in word that the pedagogues of the University of North Carolina had adopted it.3 This correspondent denounced it as “a monstrosity” and argued that -cade was “not by any chance a philological entity, like a root or suffix,” and thus could not be “lifted from one companionship and thrust into another.” But no one paid any attention to him, and soon afterward W. L. Werner reported to American Speech that it had been used in an Associated Press dispatch from Jamestown, N. D., on June 9, 1928, when a party of North Dakota politicians, headed by Governor A. G. Sorlie, started from Jamestown in a motorcade for the Republican national convention at Kansas City.1 A few months later Dr. Atcheson L. Hench, of the University of Virginia, reported that “despite legitimate protest, motorcade, like John Brown’s body, goes marching on,” and added two more examples of its use to the growing stock.2 On November 1, 1929, he said, the Baltimore Sun printed an Associated Press dispatch from Thomas, W. Va., announcing the departure of a motorcade of 500 cars from that town, and on October 1, 1930 the Charlottesville (Va.) Progress printed another from Cartersville, Ga., saying that “a motorcade of 45 or 50 masked men” had taken a colored brother named John Will Clark from the local calaboose “and hanged him to the cross-beam of a telephone pole on the fair grounds a mile away.” In the note before cited Werner reported that the invention of motorcade was ascribed by a contributor to F. P. Adams’s column in the New York Herald Tribune3 to Lyle Abbott, automobile editor of the Arizona Republican of Phoenix. Abbott used it for the first time, according to this contributor, “in 1912 or 1913 to describe the procession of motor-cars which took part in a Sociability Run from Phoenix to Prescott.” He continued:
There was some comment on the word, and the Republican’s editor, Uncle Billy Spear, the outstanding classicist and pundit among Western editors, came to Abbott’s defense with so much charm and fervor that motorcade was soon in general use in that community. It should not be used in referring to a string of cars that has formed by chance in traffic, but does properly apply to cars that have come together for a trip, parade, or demonstration with a common destination or purpose.4
Despite its success, motorcade has produced only a meagre progeny. I have encountered, indeed, none save autocade,5 aquacade,6 icecapade,7 communicade,8 camelcade and areocade.9 The more correctly formed lemonade has begotten orangeade, fruitade, pineapple-ade, gingerade, limeade and a number of others.1 “Lemonade is never written as two words, lemon ade, but its suffix sometimes detaches itself in the names of other fruit drinks. Signs advertising orange ade, grapefruit ade, wild cherry ade are not unusual. Drug stores and groceries sometimes announce lines of ades.”2
A number of the suffixes in continued use in both England and the United States show considerably more life in this country, e.g., -dom, -ster, -eer and -ette. In 1912 Logan Pearsall Smith was complaining3 that -dorn was being displaced in England by -ness, and that the effort of Thomas Carlyle and others to revive it during the Nineteenth Century had produced only one generally accepted word, boredom, which the NED traces to 1864. But this statement was far too sweeping, for though it is true that some of Carlyle’s inventions had but short lives, e.g., duncedom, 1829, rascaldom and scoundreldom, 1837, and dupedom, 1843, it is also true that various other novelties of his era have survived, e.g., officialdom, 1863, serfdom, 1850, and stardom, 1865. In the United States the old suffix, which goes back to Anglo-Saxon days, is still very much alive. In 1918 Louise Pound published in Dialect Notes4 a list of twenty-three new words embodying it, e.g., fandom, filmdom, moviedom, screendom. She made the suggestion that the influence of the analogous German -thum probably had something to do with its current popularity, and no doubt this was true, but the suffix had been in constant use long before the outbreak of World War I made Americans aware of deutschtum, kaisertum and their like.5 In 1927 Josephine M. Burnham printed a longer list,6 and showed that dom had acquired four distinguishable significances: (1) realm or jurisdiction, e.g., filmdom, fraternity dom, motordom; (2) state or condition, e.g., pauperdom, stardom, hick-dom; (3) type or character, e.g., crookdom, loaferdom, thugdom; and (4) common interest, e.g., cattledom, footballdom, puzzledom. Finally, in 1941, Dr. Harold Wentworth rounded up more than 200 dated examples of -dom words introduced since 1800, both in this country and in England, and so provided a refutation of the theory of Smith (and of various other authorities) that the suffix is obsolescent.1 Many of his earlier examples were English, but for the later years the American inventions were numerous, e.g., authordom (traced to 1925), bookdom (1918), crackerdom (1934), crossword-puzzledom (1939), dictatordom (1939), editorialdom (1939), folkdom (1939), freckledom (1940), gangsterdom (1934), grouchdom (1939), lawn-mowerdom (1933),Nazidom (1933), newsdom (1931), ringdom (1940), slumdom (1927), sovietdom (1927). To Went-worth’s list a large number of other American examples might be added, for new words in -dom are being coined all the time, e.g., retaildom.2
The suffix -ster, in the early days of English, was mainly used in the formation of feminine agent-nouns, but since the Middle Ages it has lost its suggestion of gender. At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century it began to take on a disparaging significance, apparently because of its frequent appearance in the designations of the humbler sort of workmen. The NED traces rhymester to 1719, trickster to 1711 and punster to 1700. The late O. F. Emerson, in his “Outline History of the English Language,” 1906, expressed the opinion that it was going out of use, but since then it has enjoyed a considerable revival in both England and the United States, but especially in the United States. In 1918 Dr. Pound, in the paper lately cited, listed clubster, funster, hopster, mobster, and speedster as recent American inventions, and hymnster and wordster as novelties in England, and in 1927 Miss Burnham added, gangster, gridster, dopester, roadster, prankster, playster and workster. Since then various contributors to American Speech have reported netster (a tennis-player), thugster, pinster (a bowler), stuntster, pollster (a taker of polls), mobster, campster, puckster (a hockey player), exoduster,1 and grownster. Some of these deserve to be dismissed as nonce-words, but roadster, gangster, ringster, speedster and mobster have become firmly imbedded in American speech.
Another suffix that carries a disparaging significance is -eer. This is visible in sonneteer, which the NED traces to c. 1665, in pulpiteer, which goes back to 1642, and in racketeer. The NED says that eer is an anglicized form of the French -ier, which was derived from the Latin -iarius. American Speech has recorded a large number of new words based on it in recent years, e.g., conventioneer, junketeer, Mountaineer (a soda-jerker, said to be with “no suggestion of a derogatory flavor”), vacationeer, fictioneer, motorneer (a trolley motorman), questioneer (a disseminator of questionnaires), budgeteer,2 batoneer, chariteer (a professional charity-monger), concerteer, unioneer, gardeneer, mustangeer, aeroneer (a fancier of model airplanes), oilateer (a gas-station attendant), balladeer, basketeer (a basketball player), gadgeteer, black-marketeer or blackteer, buckateer (from bucket-shop and racketeer), upper-bracketeer, ubiquiteer, swingateer, cabineteer, pigeoneer, picketeer, revolutioneer, and sloganeer.3 Profiteer is traced by the NED Supplement to 1913, but it had existed in the verbal form of profiteering since 1814. The latter was popularized b
y a speech made by David Lloyd-George in July, 1917. “I believe,” he said, “that the word is rather a good one. It is profit-eer-ing as distinguished from profiting. Profiting is fair recompense for services rendered; profit-eer-ing is an extravagant recompense, unfair in peace, and during war-time an outrage.” Patrioteer is also English. It was reintroduced to the United States in 1939 by Time, which defined it as “the professional patriot, the kind of refuge-seeking scoundrel who waves a red-white-&-blue handkerchief when he should be wiping his own nose (not, it may be hoped, with that handkerchief).”1
178. [Cellarette has been in English for more than a century, but kitchenette is American, and so are farmerette, conductorette, officerette and a number of other analogous words.] Rather curiously, the English make the first of these words cellaret, not cellarette, though they are slow to follow American example in such forms as cigaret and etiquet. The NED’s first example of cellaret, which it defines as “a case of cabinet-work made to hold wine-bottles, etc.” or “a sideboard with compartments for the same purpose,” is dated 1806–07, and comes, with excessive inappropriateness, from a book called “The Miseries of Human Life.” There are later quotations from Thackeray and Benjamin Disraeli. Suffragette also originated in England and is said to have been invented by Charles Eustace Hand, a reporter for the London Daily Mail.2 The NED’s example is from the Daily Mail of January 10, 1906. The DAE omits kitchenette, but the NED Supplement, 1933, marks it “orig. U. S. ” The thing itself was invented by Andrew J. Kerwin, a New York real-estate operator, in 1901, and he gave it its name a little while later. Thus the story has been told:
He called one evening on a young couple living in an apartment-hotel, and was touched by their effort to serve him a midnight supper of beer cooled under a bathroom tap and Welsh rabbit cooked over a gas ring. He decided then and there that even in an apartment-hotel there ought to be a place to toss together a light meal. If he hadn’t been a real-estate operator he would probably have forgotten the idea the next morning; as it was, he incorporated it into the plans of a hotel he was building.3
This hotel was the Carleton (not to be confused with the Ritz-Carlton). The kitchenette was quickly imitated by other builders of apartment-houses, and after a while it acquired a brother (or sister) in the dinette. Presently someone called a small lunch-room a luncheonette, later reduced to lunchette, and a numerous progeny followed. But it was World War I that really gave the -ette ending a start in the United States. It was first applied, I believe, to the yeo-manettes who did clerical work for the Navy and were the Stammütter of the multitudinous WACS, WAVES and so on of World War II. The function of -ette as a diminutive began to recede, and in nearly all the new words ending with it it served to indicate the feminine gender. The scouts of American Speech, especially Dwight L. Bolinger, have unearthed and recorded a great many, including usherette,1 sailorette, tractorette (a lady tractor operator), coppette (a policewoman), coxwainette, firette (a firewoman), bachelorette, glamorette, laughette, Latin Quarterette, greeterette, welcomette,2 centaurette, legionette, dudette (a female patron of a dude-ranch), drum-majorette, chaufferette, tanksterette (a woman swimmer), stagette (the feminine equivalent of stag), rockette (a chorus girl, apparently from Roxy, the name of a New York theatre), and realtyette (a female realtor).3 In Hollywood, for some reason unknown, a larval movie queen is not a starlette, but a starlet, and one full of malicious animal magnetism is an oomphlet. Despite this effeminization of the suffix it is still sometimes used as a diminutive, as in blousette, orderette, featurette, bookette (“a 6000-word condensation of a best-seller”),4 chambrette (a new-fangled sleeping-compartment on trains), bathinette (a portable bath for babies), and inette (a combination of bath and table). The English contributions include sermonette, flannelette, wagonette and leatherette. The NED says of wagonette that it is “well established” and of leatherette that it has “come into general use.” There is also the later censorette, applied to female “members of the Imperial Censorship staff which war brought to Bermuda.”5 Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, Jr., tells me that, in the San Francisco region, the Italianate suffix -etta has also made some progress; he reports cafetta (a small cafe) and tavetta (a small tavern). He also reports waffelet (a small waffle).6
Many other suffixes, new and old, have produced a plentiful offspring in the Republic, e.g., -ite, -ist, -his, -ogist, -or, -ator, -age, -ism, -ian, -ation, -atics, -ee, -ine, -ization, -craft, -ology and -ography. The hideous -ite has been put to most frequent use in the concoction of names to indicate residence or citizenship, e.g., Camdenite, Yon-kersite and Englewoodite; in that field, indeed, it shows a tendency to drive out all other suffixes.1 But it has also been heavily employed to indicate other sorts of membership or allegiance, as in Hicksite,2 socialite,3 suburbanite, laborite, trailerite, third-termite. The analogous -ist is rather more euphonious, and many of the terms embalming it are relatively respectable, e.g., impossibilist, manicurist,4 behaviorist,5 feminist, hygienist, monopolist, and alarmist. Receptionist, not listed by the DAE, has also gathered a certain amount of dignity, for there is no other word that clearly and conveniently designates the person referred to.6 But there are also such uncouth examples as swimmist, knittist, doggist,7 duopolist, oligopolist,8 cigarist, misterogynist (a man-hater),9 hoofologist, truekologist,10 emotionologist (a voice trainer),11 mentalist (a crystal-gazer),12 editorialist (an editorial writer),13 cosmetist, tennist,14 vaudevillist, neotrist,15 chalkologist, and hygiologist.16 Among public performers of various sorts there has been a tendency for years to use the French termination -iste as an indicator of femininity, as in violiniste, pianiste, saxophoniste1 and so on, to which cosmetiste may be added. The new words in -itis no doubt stem from the multitudinous medical terms showing the same suffix, and not a few of them show a suggestion of pathology, e.g., radioitis, headlineitis and golfitis. Miss Josephine M. Burnham says, in fact, that “-itis is always disparaging.”2 She lists some grotesque examples, e.g., crosswordpuzzleitis, let-George-do-h-itis and Phi-Beta-Kappa-itis. Others on her list are rather more seemly, e.g., conventionitis, danceitis, flapperitis, motoritis, Americanitis,3 committeeitis and Philippinitis.4 The suffix -ism, of course, is old in English, and has produced a huge list of words. New ones are coming in all the time, and not infrequently an old one enjoys a vigorous revival, as when absenteeism in the war plants began to attract notice in 1942. The miracle-working Henry J. Kaiser tried to get rid of it in 1943, along with it its embarrassing connotations, by introducing presenteeism.5 The English make words in -ism almost as busily as we do. Now and then a purist denounces the suffix, as when one W. P. G., wrote to John o’ London’s Weekly in 1938 to condemn pianism. The editor, however, defended it stoutly, showing that “the scholarly Athenaeum” had used it so long ago as 1889.6 But he admitted that some of its possible analogues were dubious. “I would not advise anyone,” he said, “to write of a performer that his trombonism was weak, or of a recital at the Albert Hall that the organism was superb.”7
Examples of words embodying some of the other suffixes I have listed are given by Dr. Pound in the paper already cited. Among those ending in -ee are the familiar draftee of World War I (supplanted in World War II by selectee and trainee), and honoree, used widely in the South and Middle West to indicate the person for whom a party is given. Some fantastic forms have been recorded, e.g., holdupee (the victim of a hold-up), tryoutee (one who tries for a position on a competitive basis),1 bombee, purgee, pollee (one polled in a public opinion poll), rushee, crack-upee, quizee, squeezee,2 and parolee.3 Jamboree is listed as an Americanism by the NED, and traced to 1872. When, in 1908, General Robert Baden-Powell organized the Boy Scouts in England, he borrowed the term to designate a scout festivity, and when, two years later, the scout movement was taken up in the United States it returned to the land of its birth. It has produced a number of derivatives, e.g., yamboree (a festival honoring the yam, or sweet potato)4 and camporee (from camp).5 It has also, I gather, revived the word corroboree, which came into
English from a native Australian dialect (now extinct) during the Nineteenth Century, but had died out by 1900.6 Other curious words in -ee are beateree (person or thing that “beats all”),7 tutoree and biographee.8 The old suffix -er is also put to frequent use in American word-coinage, as in soap-boxer, which is not listed by the DAE but seems to be an Americanism. The following more recent coinages are noted by Dwight L. Bolinger:9 first-termer, party-liner, inner-circler, low-incomer, rank-and-filer, underworlder, bottlenecker, WP Aer, dust-bowler, guilder and midnighter. Another ancient, -ism, has also produced a long list of American terms, e.g., greenbackism, populism, know-nothingism, red-tapeism, bossism, hoodlumism, rowdyism.10 Other old suffixes in continued request are -age, as in teacherage (a teacher’s residence, obviously suggested by parsonage),11 outage,12 up-page, readerage,1 coverage2 and overage (a bank term: the opposite of a shortage); -arian, as in Rotarian and charitarian;3 -ability, as in grindability,4 buyability,5 cleanability,6 come-atability, get-ability and clubability; -ography, as in leicography7 (from the name of the German Leica camera); and -ization, as in filmization.
But of more interest, though many of them are strained and silly, are the words showing recent vogue-affixes, e.g., -athon, as in walkathon, speedathon, danceathon, swimathon, talkathon, readathon, and superwalkathon;8 -eroo or aroo, as in floppero, kickeroo, smackeroo, and stinkaroo; -dor or tor, as in beerador and radiotor;9 -legger, as in bootlegger and meatlegger; -caster, as in newscaster and sportscaster; -crat, as in Hoovercrat, Willkiecrat10 and popocrat; -hog, as in end-seat-hog, roadhog and gashog; -mobile, as in bookmobile;11 -buster, as in trustbuster and gangbuster; -fiend, as in dopefiend and auto-grafiend; and -baloney, as in globaloney and verbaloney. All the -thon words derive from marathon, which came into general cognizance in 1896, when the first of the series of revived Olympic games was held at Athens, and rules were laid down for the famous marathon-race. Twenty-one years later, when enterprising entrepreneurs began staging dance endurance contests in the United States, they borrowed the term. The first dance contests were actually continuous, but in 1930 a manager at Des Moines, Iowa, introduced rest periods, during which the contestants walked about the floor. This new form of a marathon was called a walkathon, and in a little while the other derivatives followed.1 Readathon usually appears as Bible-readathon; it designates a relay reading of the Bible by a series of pious persons, usually led by their pastor.2 The history of -eroo has been investigated by Dr. Harold Wentworth.3 He suggests that it may have been borrowed from buckaroo, a corruption of the Spanish vaquero, a cowboy, traced by the DAE, through the various forms of buckeroo, buckayro, bucchro, buckhara and buckharer, to c. 1861.4 He says:
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