Wednesday, 20 May 2015
10:58 PM
I forget how I found this, but a couple of days ago I ended up on a blog dedicated to writing fiction. Name? The Fictorians. That's a nice play on Victorian, and it's a clever use of the combining form -(t)arian (or a version of that), which Merriam-Webster defines as "believer" or "advocate" (vegetarian) or "producer" (disciplinarian).
And earlier this week I was at a conference for technical writers, where I discovered that we seem now to be calling ourselves by a new name: documentarians. Here's a slide that was presented at the conference.
I asked around about this term, because it was new to me. People noted that it was a known term for someone who creates documentary films. It seems that this new sense— documentation + -(t)arian in its "producer" sense—arose about a year ago, perhaps at last year's edition of the very conference that I was attending. Or so I interpret a thread on a tech-writing list.
One of the people I asked was Ben Zimmer, word guru. He wondered whether documentarian had been inspired by the cluster of words that was spun off from vegatarian: pescetarian (fish), fruitarian, nutatarian, flexitarian, etc. A quick peek into the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for *tarian also got me pastatarian, pollotarian (chicken), and pizzatarian.
These would fall under the "believer/advocate" use of the –arian particle, I suppose. Even so, new terms like this might be helping the –(t)arian particle become a more widely used cranberry morpheme or libfix (as Arnold Zwicky might call it), and helping along new and imaginative uses for it.
Update (May 24, 2015): Nancy Friedman noted to me today that the A.Word.A.Day site listed futilitarian as its word for May 7—"Devoted to futile pursuits" or "Holding the belief that human striving is useless."
[categories]
language, work
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