In linguistics, a libfix is a productive bound morpheme affix created by rebracketing and back-formation, often a generalization of a component of a blended or portmanteau word. For example, walkathon was coined in 1932 as a blend of walk and marathon, and soon thereafter the -athon part was reinterpreted as a libfix meaning "event or activity lasting a long time or involving a great deal of something". Words formed with this suffix include talkathon, telethon, hackathon, and so on. Affixes whose morpheme boundaries are etymologically based, and which are used in their original sense, are not libfixes. Libfixes often utilise epenthesis, as in the example of -holism and -holic which are joined with consonant-final segments via the vowel ⟨a⟩, creating work-a-holism or sex-a-holism.
Huh... Thats super neat. Weirdly kinda like a linguistic equivalent of the "standalone complex" from ghost in the shell 😅
I was just thinking about this earlier. Technically, helicopter comes from helico, meaning circular, and pter, meaning wing. So quadcopter should logically be "quadpter"
lol, that seems a little difficult to say
If you wanna be really technical about it, a quadcopter has four wings that move in circles, so that'd just be quad-helicopter, but that's a huge mouthful.
Ehh, you could argue that quadcopter is an abbreviation of "quad-helicopter" ("four circular wings").
Edit: I now see the other reply said effectively the same thing. Sorry!
Hmm. Always thought that was called a postfix. But apparently postfix is email routing software.
What you're thinking of is called a "suffix" in linguistics. This libfix thing is a specialized version of suffixes, if I understand correctly.
Stargate
I always thought adding -gate to indicate a scandal was super dumb.
