(no subject)

[jack]

From http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1471, suggests that this should be a new form of “-punk”. Instead of Steampunk or Cyberpunk, we have some new kind of punk for 1970’s futurist big iron mainframe-style computer tech, with tape drives, blinky-light interfaces, and toggle-switch inputs.

The thing is, I'm just imagining future etymologists looking at the adjective punk[1], and saying "Hold on, so first there were all these people in green spiky hair and paperclip-piercings, and then all of a sudden they started wearing dodgy white jumpsuits and making retrotech? WTF?"

[1] What specific linguistic phenomenon do I mean? The "-holic" one, I guess.

Comments

[zebbiejohnson.livejournal.com]

Isn't the '-punk' ending roughly used to mean 'ostentatiously marginal people with a certain who-cares attitude' (possibly as in 'make my day, punk').
In this sense it is more like -saurus on different type of dinosaur: yeah, the word has some kind of literal meaning relating to a noun (a spiky-haired punk with a safety pin earring, for example, or a lizard) but the way it is used in compound form is very much only a derivation of concept from that.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

In this sense it is more like -saurus on different type of dinosaur

I totally misread this, thinking "I don't know what a punkosaurus is, but I want to meet one" :)

But yes, I think what you said is what I was trying to say. That that shift in meaning happened naturally, but ended up in a surprising place. (My favourite is mannerpunk, referring to space opera with interesting societies and spaceships, but also personal relationships and growth, ie. Bujold. But everyone else thinks that term is insulting to both.)

I hadn't considered the intermediate stage of "punk-like attitude, but not punk", I don't know if that's the history, but it must be something like that.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

"That that shift in meaning happened naturally"

Doesn't it all come out of cyberpunk? I had assumed that was coined by somebody like Bruce Sterling, with an eye on the marketing implications.

Personally, I find the application of -punk to everything mildly irritating, because it has so little connection with what I think of as punk: anger, politics, music, rejection of money and politeness and success and business and government. Put it another way: I have punk friends, and friends who are into steampunk: I can't imagine the two groups getting on, or finding any shared outlook on the world.

But if that's what people want their words to mean, who am I to complain?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Bruce Bethke writes about the origin of the word cyberpunk. And etymology of punk.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

hmmm....OK.

Apparently my mental map of those words doesn't have much relation to the facts ;)

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

LOL at spiky-haired retrotechs :-)

I like Craypunk or Vaxpunk. Though the latter sounds a little unfortunate.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

And CUSFS's Valvepunk :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

My suggestion is “retromodernism”

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

The -holic type of morphological change is sometimes described by linguists by the term "blending" or "contamination", which suggests there's some kind of whole word analogy going on in speakers' minds e.g. alcoholic "addicted to alcohol" : chocoholic "addicted to chocolate". But you could also classify it as a kind of resegmentation (alcohol-ic > alco-holic), analysing -holic as a new productive morpheme indicating addiction. Other examples of linguistic resegmentation are "a nadder" > "an adder" (similarly with "orange" and "apron") and the Irish pronoun "muid" meaning "we", which was back-formed from the verb ending for the 1st person plural -mait.

Using "punk" as an element in words like "steampunk" or "cyberpunk" I would just classify as compounding: you can use it on its own as a noun or adjective (even a verb, perhaps - "let's punk your hair up a bit") unlike -holic or indeed -ic, which are bound morphemes.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks! In that case it sounds like resegmentation, the breakdown "alco-holic" is awfully seductive. Ah, I've thought of an example that means what I want, "-riffic", etc. Regardless of the etymology of "terrific", the point of "chocriffic" etc is to mean "terribly chocolatey (with connotations of happy-go-lucky because we're smooshing words together)". I guess "bus" might apply too? Does that make any sense?

Using "punk" as an element in words like "steampunk" or "cyberpunk"

Now you say that, I think I see where I was trying to be coming from. That I think "cyberpunk" was an original combination of "cyber" and "punk" but "steampunk" might have *some* connotations of "punk" but what it actually means is "to steam what cyberpunk is to cyber"

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

"bus" is an example of what is sometimes termed "clipping", where a word is replaced/supplemented by an abbreviation of itself (c.f. deli, cafe). But yes, there's lots of similarity in all these types of morphological/lexical change. And yes, semantic change can very easily accompany them. It's all very messy :-) This is why I prefer phonological change; much more straightforward to categorise and research!

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

FlarePunk?

Of course, nothing is so jarringly 'retro' as yesterday's conception of the future. Read 'Neuromancer' or 'Snow Crash' again: it's the future we were going to have in the early 1980's.

Or better still, read The Gernsback Continuum, a short story on this very topic by Bruce Sterling.

Now for the horribly convoluted point: recent 'Steampunk' isn't the future that might've happened had Babbage got his act together - it isn't even the future the Victorians thought they were going to have. It is our caricature of the Victorians and 'The Future they were going to have'. I look forward to reading 'flarepunk' with mounting trepidation and the urge to buy a pair of gravity-assisted platform shoes.

Time to consult my copy of 1001 Useful Tenses for Time Travelers.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"It is our caricature of the Victorians and 'The Future they were going to have'"

Sounds pretty non-convoluted and undeniable to me :)

I can't remember, did I give my conception of steampunk? I don't know how it describes it originally, but I think what draws people I know is that it it's optimism from a time when technology was understandable, that an intellectual education could translate directly into successfully fiddling with things, and associated clothing and social mores.