By Joel Patton
I've seen a t-shirt [1] that looks as though it's going involve a loud morality-police tongue-clicking but which jukes instead into a loud language-police tongue-clicking [2]. I've included a version [3] of the phrase at the beginning of this piece.
The objection here is mostly theoretical, of course; the paraprosdokian is the point [4]. Still, the joke puts me in mind of an objection raised against another Latin-Greek work: television:
“Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device.” C P Scott, 1936
I've seen suggestions of polyphilia, but I don't think that'll work. -philia is too well established as a pathology [5], or at least an oddity, often in opposition to a -phobia [6].
Multiamory just sounds off [7].
Clearly there's no hope for television, since it's ossified and we already had telescope anyway [8].
Neologisms usually bear the brunt of any grumbling, but this sort of mismatch happens fairly often. The level of specialization seems to make a difference, too... if you don't like polyamory or television, you shouldn't like neuroscience or ex-husbands or uber-anything non-Deutsch [9].
MANTISSAE
1. Well, I've seen various graphic arrangements of various versions of the phrase, some of them printed onto t-shirts.
2. I wrote this first draft of this piece longhand with an art pencil in the pre-spring sun, and the soft, heavy graphite looked like chitin, like druse.
3. The which macro I cherry-picked because of the grammatical error.
4. One shouldn't define by example, but I enjoy it nonetheless: my favorite paraprosdokian is Groucho's “Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.”
5. Hemophilia, eg. Much more fun to spell if you live in a Commonwealth nation.
6. Coulrophilia, eg, which I'm making up except inasmuch as it has to exist, but looking it up on Google is more than I can handle this afternoon.
7. It's probably just because the other word is already fixed -- viz later in the essay, not that there's very much later in this one.
8. There's no Latin equivalent for tele-, apparently.
9. I've heard this prefix less since the taxi app appeared....
Joel Patton is a potter in Traveler's Rest, SC