Roots
Go back and forth
Deepti

On coming across two related words dealing with one concept, common sense says that the shorter one would be the origin of the longer one. As, for instance, ‘beautiful’ arose from ‘beauty’. But, if language followed the rules of logic then it would become too simplistic to keep man busy. There are several words in English that are created by a process called ‘back formation’. As the term reveals, this process creates words by deleting certain parts of an already existing word. One can take as an example, the verb ‘edit’ which was created later by shortening the older word ‘editor’. In the same way, televise came from television, baby sit from babysitter, sculpt from sculptor and gloom from gloomy.

Purists look down upon back formations and hold that ‘to back form is to vulgarise language’. Of course, they are unaware that the verb ‘back form’ is itself a back formation! They frown at words like intuit (intuition), liase (liaison), enthuse (enthusiasm) and couth (uncouth) because they are back formations of the original words in brackets. It might be useful here to remember that perfectly acceptable words began life as back formations. ‘Donate’ started its career in American English as a back formation from ‘donation’.

The word ‘sherry’ tells an interesting tale. Shakespeare first used the word in 1597, not as ‘sherry’ but as ‘sherris’ because he borrowed it from Spanish. In Spain, this liquor carried the eponym of ‘xeres’ after the town of Xeres where this wine was made. Shakespeare used it as ‘sherris’, and later on it was shortened to ‘sherry’, giving another victory to back formation.

Most back formations in English are verbs that are created keeping in mind the other verbs in use. Verbs like diagnose, peddle, beg, swindle, escalate, abduct, appreciate, electrocute, investigate and negate are all created from longer words. ‘Embedded journalist’ was an expression created by the practice of sending reporters to live with military units in Iraq. Within days, the word ‘embed’ was created for such a journalist, giving ‘embed’ another connotation in addition to the one of ‘implanted’.