I recently heard that a gay acquaintance of mine has gotten divorced. I mention his sexual orientation certainly not because there’s anything wrong with it but because it’s relevant to the matter of what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls “two-part back-formed verbs,” aka 2pbfVs. Zwicky has been cataloguing examples of these, at Language Log and on his own website, since 2008, when he wrote about the verb form gay marry, which he had just encountered in a quote on someone else’s blog: “I did an interview with a guy in Seattle — totally random, I had never met him before — who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece, I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone.”
Zwicky observed that this was “undoubtedly a back-formation from gay marriage (with its nonpredicating modification), the result being a compound verb of a pattern (Adj + V).” (A back-formation is the term for when a word or phrase functioning as one part of speech yields a word or phrase functioning as another: the verb curate coming from the older noun curator, for example.) He wondered, sensibly, “Why would anyone use gay marry literally, when the context almost always makes the sex of the marriage partner clear? Isn’t gay marry redundant (and wordy) in context?”
Zwicky’s response to his own question was that the additional word is there for the sake of explicitness or emphasis. I think that’s true especially among people who are against gay marriage, as in an internet comment he quotes: “While I guess it should be legal to practice homosexualliy [sic] in privacy [sic], I believe it should be illegal to gay marry or to show gay affection in public. If this kind of thing is allowed, marriage in this country will go strait [sic] to hell.”
But there’s another reason, which he doesn’t mention, and which can be seen in the initial blog quote and in a headline he cites from The Onion: “Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens to Gay Marry.” The reason is that, because of its wordiness and redundancy, gay marry is kind of funny.
Zwicky next posted on the subject during the height of the 2008 political campaign, noting such verbs as absentee-vote and early-vote. (All of these forms are sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not, but I like the hyphen). They suggest a third reason for the construction: streamlining. Without the 2pbfV, one would have to say “vote by absentee ballot” or something like, “take advantage of the early-voting provision.”
Zwicky gave the formation a name, but another linguist, Neal Whitman, had started writing about it earlier, with 2004 posts about people-watch, fence-sit, underage-drink, and price-match.
Between the two of them (and with assistance from contributors to the American Dialect Society email discussion list), Whitman and Zwicky have come up with quite a collection over the years, including: ambulance-chase; backseat-drive (also drunk-drive); comfort-eat; doctor-shop; hate-watch (a television show, for example); serial-kill; slut-shame; speed-date; store-buy; substitute-teach; three-D-print; travel-write; and victim-blame.
One thing that fascinates me about the form is the variety of operations or meanings implied by the hyphen (or space). Say X is the first term and Y the second. In basic cases (including the first two examples in the paragraph above), the verb means “be an X-Yer” or engage in the practice of “X-Ying.” Sometimes, as in people-watch, it merely sort of formalizes the activity of Y-Xing, that is, watching people. But other cases are more complicated: comfort-eat means “eat in order to comfort oneself”; doctor-shop, “shop for a doctor”; and hate-watch, “watch a show that you don’t like in order to get a kind of perverse pleasure out of its badness.” Generally, to the extent that “X-Ying” or “X-Y-er” is not an established thing, the resultant verb becomes pointed or funny — “marked,” in the linguist’s sense of an expression that perks up our ears.
The formation of 2pbfVs continues apace. In a recent interview, after denying that he favored “mass deportations,” Donald Trump said, “President Obama has mass-deported vast numbers of people — the most ever, and it’s never reported. I think people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody.” What he meant is anybody’s guess.
And that brings me back to my acquaintance. When I heard the news about his split, I (being me) wondered whether there’s such a 2pbfV as gay divorce. Talk about wordy and redundant! There is really no need for the gay. Whether you gay-married or straight-married, a divorce is the same thing. Yet get gay divorced yielded 2,380 Google hits the other day, including a promo for a fake ad on Conan O’Brien’s show for “Schmecky and Schmecky: Gay Divorce Attorneys.” One of the Schmeckys fast-talks:
Typical story: You fall in love so you get gay-married. Everything is going gay-fine. Then you hit a gay-bump in the road. … We’ll get you gay-divorced in no gay-time at all!
Like I said, kind of funny.