Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Slash as a Conjunction

 ... has been noticed by linguists.

I wonder when they'll get around to the use of an exclamation mark as a compound word juncture (as in male!Morgan).
Tags: linguistics, news
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  • 6 comments
technoshaman

technoshaman

May 4 2013, 15:03:26 UTC 8 years ago

Innnnnnnnteresting. And she didn't *even* go into the *other* sense of slash, as used in fanfic...

(Which is itself interesting, as while slashfic *originated* in SF/F fandom, it *spread* to other genres - Due South, Hawai'i 5-0, and the A-Team, among others... )

It occurs to me that that's not the first punctuation mark that's "become a word".. 'Period" has long been a way of saying "no exceptions"... and "Question mark" (while usually just shift-pinky in text, can be *said* as well) as a milder way of saying WTF has been around for a bit... Slash may just be the *newest* thing to catch academia's notice.
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

May 4 2013, 19:23:33 UTC 8 years ago

It's interesting to watch the evolution of language like this. I use ?? as a generic inquiry at times.
starcat_jewel

starcat_jewel

May 4 2013, 16:42:55 UTC 8 years ago

Interesting. I suppose the reason I haven't encountered this at all is that most of my circle of acquaintance is at least a generation up from the ones who are using it.
thnidu

thnidu

May 4 2013, 19:32:04 UTC 8 years ago

I was wondering about that (as a linguist myself). But unlike "/" / "slash", the compounding "!" is AFAICT limited to fanficdom. Am I right? At least, this arena, through you and other writers that I've gotten to through your links, is the only place I've seen it.

ankewehner

ankewehner

May 4 2013, 20:32:52 UTC 8 years ago

Well, a circle of writers I'm part of uses that when talking about original fiction, and afaik most of us don't write fanfic much, if at all.

I'm pretty sure I picked it up from people who mostly write fanfic, though.
ysabetwordsmith

Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

May 4 2013, 21:24:34 UTC 8 years ago

I have not seen the compounding "!" outside of fandom. What baffles me is where it came from and how it happened. It seems very alien to English structure. It's not just a substitute for a hyphen: the "!" means that the first word is a subset marker for the second, almost like a file folder stack. It works with different front modifiers (adjective, noun, verb) and the modifier consistently comes before a noun, whereas other compounds can have different structures (blue-green, for instance, is adjective-adjective).

Morgan (all the iterations of Morgan that exist)
male!Morgan (a member of the subset of Morgans who are male)
BAMF!Morgan (a member of the subset of Morgans with badass status)
crying!Morgan (a member transecting the subset of the moments of Morgan's life in which Morgan cries)