There’s a name that curmudgeonly grammarians give to words derived from more than one language—and for the life of me, I can’t think of it. Television is a famous example, a Greek prefix on a Latin stem. Uber-theocon is another, less-famous example, a epithet someone or other flung at me once, which combines German, Greek, and Latin.
I don’t object strongly to this kind of word, but I know, somewhere in a misspent life, I’ve read people who do. And they call it . . . um, what? A barbarism? A multiradicalism? A pluripotent stem cell?
Email me if you know the name—only you can help end this terrible word deprivation.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry
On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in…
