Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 13:57:46 -0400 From: Gregory {Greg} Downing Subject: Re: Blendings in Festival Names At 07:57 AM 10/24/97 -0400, you (Robert Ness ) wrote: >Here in Carlisle PA we have an "Octubafest" (beer and tubas). Give it a >miss. > There are plenty of these festival coinages in New York: Wigstock (from Woodstock) is a cross-dressing event, and Woofstock is a canine event that raises money for the ASPCA. I don't think this is just about festivals. There's a very common tendency to coin proper names by taking existing compound words and changing one of their components, maybe especially the first of the two components. Think for example of all the "-----gate" scandals in the 80's and 90's, based on Watergate. I probably can't recall them all (from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years), but a few of them I've heard or read about are Iran-Contragate, Koreagate, Whitewatergate, Travelgate, Filegate, etc. etc. (Someone with NEXIS etc. could find them all I'm sure). This isn't a strict morphological thing; none of the "-----gates" has anything to do with a gate. (Cf. "copter," and compounds and collocations built on it, which result from an intuitive sonic division rather than a morphological division of helico-pter; and the now-insecapable "cyber----," which results from a nonetymological and nonmorphological division of cybern-etic, where the cybern- element has to do with the arrangement or government of a system, and not with computers at all originally.) It's just that everyone knows "-----gate" was a defining scandal, and "----stock" was a defining festival. I think brand names are sometimes coined by this method too, especially gimmicky silly ones targeted at a very young audience, but I can't think of any just now (and have to get back to other things) -- perhaps others can think of some. God bless us, every one??????? (Absit (n)omen!) Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu