Monday, April 14, 2008

Ish

Well, it's taken a month for me to recover from the horror of showing my blog to my students in class. I don't know how well the blog activity is going, other than the fact that they seem to be reading slightly more broadly than they were before.

But in lexical matters, I'd like to talk about "ish." About a month and a half ago, my seven year-old lexical innovator, we'll call her "Little Miss Sunshine," started using "ish" as a full lexeme, with a meaning equivalent to "sort of." She'd use it as a post-positive qualifier, as in this brief exchange we had the day after Nickelodeon's Kid Choice Awards:
"Mom, I think Miley Cyrus is just ish. She's not great. Just ish."
"Is that right? So you don't like Hannah Montana."
"She's just not rock and roll enough, mom."

Now, after recovering from the horror that my daughter is so far out of the mainstream of seven year-old life that she prefers Tegan and Sara to Hannah Montana, I began wondering where she got this usage. Lately I've seen a number of "tween" tv shows (yes, I watch them--never let your children watch television alone), as well as grown-up shows where characters use an "emphatic -ish."

In last week's Time, magazine, however, the word emerged from its Urbandictionary.com and seven year-old lexicon into the mainstream media.

So, does this hearken back to the clipping of "-bus" from "omnibus"? And is this really evidence of the lexical nature of derivational morphemes?