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.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
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