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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“He was so unabashful, he would hike his hiney, f@rt and then call a secretary into the office. Poor Joann.”
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“Unabashful” is clearly a blend of unabashed and bashful and is surprisingly common on the web. It’s one of those kissin’ cousins reunions between two words, from the same root, that have been living separate lives for centuries.
I notice that the paragraph from which this quote came also contains another strangely morphed word: “nicked named”. This one is very widespread. Does it mean something or is it just some sort of contagious suffix?
Lawyer bashing site
The funny thing is that Wheaton was nicked named by some of the secretaries as “hiney hiker.â€
(http://levinsonaxelrod.net/?p=14)
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Yeah—I think “nicked named” is the result of a “contagious suffix”—a topic I’ve written on somewhere before, but I unfortunately never thought to give it that catchy name.
This kind of stuff is pretty easy to find—“leaded footed” gets about 64 ughits at the moment, most of them the target reshaping. I think that the numbers can go significantly higher when the word infected with the suffix can also function as a verb.
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Outside our local supermarket the management, concerned that customers would not show up on Remembrance Day, posted a sign that read “opened on November 11.” Another example of the egregious -ed.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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