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The Allegedly Dead Suffix -dom in Modern English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harold Wentworth
Harold Wentworth*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Extract

The sharp division, not to say chaos, of opinion on whether the native English suffix -dom is dead or is active and freely available for forming nouns is illustrated by the following thirteen representative views, all but one of which are of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1941 , pp. 280 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

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References

Note 1 in page 280 The original statements contain no italics for emphasis.

1a In a letter of April 23, 1940, Professor Baugh says: “Recent use of the suffix seems generally to be in half serious coinages.”

Note 2 in page 281 Professor Pound's article, quoted from above and titled “Vogue Affixes in Present-Day English,” Dialect Notes, v, Part i, pp. 1–14, is one of the very few that discuss -dom. Her twenty-four documented examples are given in §6 below.

Note 3 in page 281 Mr. Mencken's examples derive mainly from Professor Pound, and Professor Josephine M. Burnham, whose “Three Hard-Worked Suffixes,” American Speech (February, 1927), pp. 244–246, has nearly fifty -dom words (see §6 below). Unfortunately many of the examples lack quotations, dates, and specific sources. “Newspapers, popular magazines, and student speech” provided all but four.

Note 4 in page 281 Op. cit., pp. 371 f.

Note 5 in page 281 (1) The earliest of these writers is H. Butter, whose Etymological Spelling Book and Expositor (238th (sic) edition, London, about 1860) says: “[Other nouns] are derived from Saxon, and end in . . . -dom; as, freedom, wisdom, kingdom, thraldom, earldom.” Such ancient examples to the exclusion of those of his own day (see below: beadledom, bogledom, Gaeldom, gypsydom, mormaordom, Mormondom, vestrydom, waiterdom, and dolldom,—all used in 1860, if not earlier) suggest ignorance of them.

(2) Another book, J. Walker's Rhyming Dictionary (3rd ed., London, n.d.—1865, Mudge—, p. 280), similarly gives eighteen words in -dom, chiefly Old English or otherwise antique, but none of the century or two preceding publication of his book. Among the words is polypidom, which would mean “polyps collectively” if its ending were OE -dom; but here -dom is from Greek domos, house.—Random and seldom, though long in English, are not from OE -dom=realm, state, etc.

(3) In 1883, A. C. Webb's Manual of Etymology (Philadelphia, Eldredge and Brothers), p. 43, treated eighty suffixes, including -dom, but cited only dukedom and princedom; and his Model Definer of about 1889 gave only the same words (p. 117).

(4) The classic Greenough and Kittredge's Words and Their Ways in English Speech (1901, 1929) takes up about 3,000 words, among them go-ahead-itive-ness and motoneer, but only OE kingdom of nouns in -dom, according to the index. Like Robertson's, this book regards -ly, -ness, -ish, and -y as living, certain others as dead, but ignores -dom.

Note 6 in page 282 G. H. McKnight, in English Words and Their Background (1923), devotes a paragraph (pp. 175 f.) to -ie, -y, “one of the most actively alive of all elements in modern speech,” and attributes to affixes in general the “most prolific method of creating new words” (p. 171), but omits -dom from a list of eight “available” native suffixes and apparently from consideration elsewhere in this book.

W. L. Graff's elaborately nomenclatural Language and Languages (1932) states: “. . . if an affix is still a current means of word formation, it is said to be living or productive” (p. 152); he illustrates the living by -ness, -ly, -ing, and -er, and the dead by -th, as in health, but does not comment on -dom.

For another reason, G. P. Krapp's remark in Modern English, Its Growth and Present Use (1909), sheds no light upon the present use of the suffix in question: “The element -dom . . . forms compounds like kingdom, wisdom, freedom, etc. . . .” (p. 191). In this statement, forms implies present activity, but the OE examples adduced imply activity past and finished.

Similarly, H. C. Wyld's Universal Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1932) gives three OE examples, but makes no pronouncement upon the aliveness or deadness of -dom. Nor does Henry Bradley treat it in The Making of English (New York, 1917, 1904), ch. iv, §2, “Derivation.”

R. W. Brown's Materials for Word Study: A Manual of Roots, Prefixes and Derivatives . . . (New Haven, 1927) gives eight examples in -dom, mostly old, none after 1850.

6a To Mr. Allen Walker Read I am indebted for the following excellent contemporary comments showing the vogue of this suffix in the latter half of the 19th century. (1) 1867: “. . . the facile terminal ‘dom’, which so often has brought up the rear-guard of a sentence in the papers, is due to [N. P.] Willis, who struck it out in ‘japonicadom’ . . . ”—Frederick S. Cozzens, The Sayings of Dr. Bushwhacker (New York), p. 53. (2) 1883: “Among the recent vulgarisms that have crept into the press is an abuse of the suffix dom. . . as legitimately used in kingdom, Christendom . . . The word, however, does not admit of unlimited extension at the hands either of neologists or of would-be comic writers. ‘Officialdom is strong in France . . . ‘—Globe. Still worse than officialdom, is womandom. . . and trouserdom, as used . . . in the Pall Mall Gazette [last year] . . . But . . . nothing is sacred to the grinning sciolists who aspire to be facetious.”—Dudley Errington, “Fashionable English,” in the Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 254 (June), p. 581.

Note 7 in page 283 OE -dōm. Cf. do, doom, deem, Ger. t(h)um, Du. -dom.

Note 8 in page 283 Bradley says: “Almost all those modes of derivation which were actually current in Old English have continued in constant use down to the present time.”—Op. cit., p. 131.

8a “[-dom denotes] a class with its (especially contemptible) ways.”—Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1936).

8b Typographically excluded from the two-page Table above are: trouserdom 1882; peardom, cameldom 1885; rabbindom 1889; jingodom 1895; otherdom 1900; rushdom, pledgedom, rifledom, seniordom 1927; hobbyhorsedom 1933; micedom, boyardom, babidom, babudom 1934; sleddogdom 1936; Acedom 1938; listendom 1939; Afrikanerdom, Puffdom 1940.

Note 9 in page 287 Op. cit., p. 93.

Note 10 in page 287 “The works of Carlyle present an . . . abundance of new . . . derivatives, largely formed in imitation of German . . . [His] influence has been effective in promoting a freer use of native English formatives than was tolerated in the early . . . nineteenth century.”—Bradley, op. cit., p. 236.

Note 11 in page 288 Punch has jockeydom, 1869; and see Haldeman's quotation above.

Note 12 in page 289 University of Missouri Studies, xiii, No. 1 (January 1, 1938), Columbia, Missouri, 397 quarto pages.

Note 13 in page 289 Paine removed the word uncledom between magazine and book publication, according to Professor Delancey Ferguson, American Literature, viii. 44.

Note 14 in page 289 Europe and Elsewhere (1923), p. 239.

Note 15 in page 289 Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (Garden City, New York, 1937), 426 pp.

Note 16 in page 289 Professor Louise Pound's “Walt Whitman's Neologisms,” American Mercury (February, 1925), pp. 199–201, discusses words in -ism, -ion, -ness, -cy, and -ship, but not -dom.

16a P. xcvi.

Note 17 in page 291 Movie, movies, and the movies are all U. S. slang, and movieize and movie-minded are colloquial in Webster, but moviedom has no label. Perhaps it is understood that moviedom takes the status of movie (cf. Kennedy below), but swelldom does not exactly follow swell in this respect, as shown above.

Note 18 in page 291 Not including Archaic, attached to halidom(e), of OE origin.

Note 19 in page 291 Catdom, called an Americanism in Dialect Notes, v, is first exemplified in the NED by the Pall Mall Gazette and the Illustrated London News.

Note 20 in page 292 Op. cit., p. 245.

Note 21 in page 292 Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July, 1932, p. 445.

Note 22 in page 292 August 7, 1939, p. 60.

Note 23 in page 292 The Periodical, March 15, 1934, p. 21. An identical case is: “The ‘royalty’ of babydom had its day at the New York state fair yesterday.”—Photo caption, Syracuse, New York, Post-Standard, September 4, 1939, p. 13.

Note 24 in page 292 August 12, 1939, p. 11.

Note 25 in page 293 Cf. Burnham, op. cit., p. 244.

Note 26 in page 293 In expressions like plant kingdom, animal kingdom, and Cattle Kingdom (title of a novel by Alan LeMay) there is no meaning of king. Kingdom here simply means “realm” or “-dom.” Plantdom and cattledom are more logical than the corresponding phrases, but *animaldom seems not to have been used.

Note 27 in page 293 It happens that more of these, about 40, begin with the letter p than with any other; c. 30 with b, c. 25 with s.

27a R. W. Emerson, for example, rimed martyrdom with come and hum in “The Humble Bee” (1839), ll. 17 ff.

Note 28 in page 294 From Old English to about 1800, trochees appear to equal or exceed dactyls in number, but other feet are rare.

Note 29 in page 295 February, 1930, p. 23.

Note 30 in page 295 In The Periodical. Also in a request by C. T. Onions, N&Q, 157.5.76.

30a Since this sentence was written, Mr. Allen Walker Read has kindly contributed to the article some sixty British citations, including one for dictatordom. More than half of the terms illustrated by them were not previously known to me, and nearly all of the citations are incorporated in § 6 below. Two appear in Note 6a above.

* Asterisks precede supposititious words.

Note 31 in page 295 Op. cit., p. 162.

Note 32 in page 295 The NED and Webster have jackassery, jackassification, jackassism, and jackassness, but not *jackassdom. Webster has pigdom, hogship, hoghood, hoggism, but not *hogdom. Creative lexicography might fill these two and other gaps.

32a Additional instances, unclassified (-dom omitted): beast, belltopper, brewer, bully, butler, Christian, criminal, dollar, guzzle, huddle, hussy, mammon, master, muddle, orphan, owl, reptile, scepter, skunk, Slav, snob, spy, thee, thegn, throne, Turk, upholstery, usher, hobbledehoy.