{"id":94,"date":"2006-07-03T17:01:05","date_gmt":"2006-07-03T16:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/03\/cran-morphing\/"},"modified":"2006-07-03T17:01:05","modified_gmt":"2006-07-03T16:01:05","slug":"cran-morphing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=94","title":{"rendered":"Cran-morphing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s word-tastic topic is cran-morphing, the practice of dismantling words and glueing parts of them on to other words. Word-tastic is an example of this that I just made up &#8211; it combines the word word with -tastic from fantastic. Another popular cran-moph is -gate, as in Irangate, Dianagate and Whitewatergate. This comes from the Watergate Scandal, named after a hotel in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n<p>Cran-morphs or cranberry morphs usually only mean something in relation to the words from which they have been detached. All those whatever-gates usually have nothing to do with gates, though you could construct a folk etymology along these lines &#8211; this cran-morph is associated with scandals and cover-ups which involve the revealing of secrets. The opening of a gate could be linked to the discovery of those secrets.<\/p>\n<p>Other cran-morphs include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>-tabulous, from fan<strong>ta<\/strong>stic and fa<strong>bulous<\/strong>, as in fantabulous and  blog-tabulous<\/li>\n<li>-holic, from alco<strong>holic<\/strong>, as in shopaholic, chocoholic and biblioholic<\/li>\n<li>-thon, from mara<strong>thon<\/strong>, as in telethon, shopathon and eatathon<\/li>\n<li>-licious, from de<strong>licious<\/strong>, as in magalicious<\/li>\n<li>-nomics, from eco<strong>nomics<\/strong>, as in ergonomics, Clintonomics, cybernomics and Enronomics<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Details of the origin of the term cran-morphing can be found on <a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/002794.html\">Language log<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For more whatever-gates, see <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix\">Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s word-tastic topic is cran-morphing, the practice of dismantling words and glueing parts of them on to other words. Word-tastic is an example of this that I just made up &#8211; it combines the word word with -tastic from fantastic. Another popular cran-moph is -gate, as in Irangate, Dianagate and Whitewatergate. This comes from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}