Meanings of -nomics in English: From Nixonomics to coronanomics

Abstract

Blends have long been a source of new lexical elements in English word formation. Classic examples of such elements include -burger in words like soyburger or oysterburger, -furter in words like turkeyfurter or chickenfurter and -scape in cloudscape or manscape. Among more recent examples are -zilla (bridezilla, momzilla), -cation (staycation, mancation) or -splain(ing) (mansplaining, whitesplaining). Some of these have been studied in greater or lesser detail, highlighting various researchers’ interests in the topic, such as regularities in blend formation, formal and semantic patterns of blends, or the emergence of new combining forms from lexical blends (see in particular Baldi & Dawar, 2000; Frath, 2005; Kemmer, 2003; Lalić–Krstin, 2014; Lehrer, 1998; Mattiello, 2017a, 2017b; Panić–Kavgić & Kavgić, 2009).