#back formation

today in a meeting about a poorly designed study my boss was trying to describe one of the things wrong with it and said "i don't know what to call it, but if we were talking about a word it would be back formation. back formation is...well you all know what it is, i don't have to explain back formation to you." which raised two questions for me: 1) do we all know what back formation is? i know what it is but i have a linguistics degree, so i sort of assumed it's somewhat specialized knowledge. but maybe not? maybe a random assortment of people working in healthcare research could be expected to know what it is. interesting to ponder. and 2) does my boss know what back formation is? because it did not seem super related to what he was talking about. lol.

Odd linguistic observation of the day: Unless I am mishearing her, a student of mine seems to be analyzing the word "paranoid" as analogous to "annoyed". Consequently, she is employing the back-formation "parannoy" as a verb meaning "to cause paranoia". I assumed I misheard her the first time, but she said it again later on and I really think that's what she said. Teenagers have such fascinating speech.

when you think of the beloved morphological process of back formation, don't forget the humble bicep, created from the singular noun biceps being reanalyzed as a plural noun with the suffix -s

Oh, it’s a gee [gi]! No, it’s a goose! -finch, age 2