Paul McFedries' Tech Tonic

Hi, On p226 of The C.I.G.T.W.W.O. you write "...but also the suffix -ard, which has a negative connotation that indicates either sarcasm or excess. It's seen in lots of English insults, including canard, coward, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, and, or course, CELEBUTARD." First of all, 'canard' comes from the French word for 'duck'. The Online Etymology Dictionary says "From O.Fr. quanart, probably echoic of a duck's quack". So no English -ard suffix here, at least not historically and etymologically. Maybe you just meant that it's parsed that way *now* by English speakers. Same goes for "Celebutard", from which the -tard ending comes from the Latin tardare, meaning 'slow'. Not the ME suffix -ard.

Oh and another comment on the book, on page 2 you posit the origin of abracadabra from the Chaldean (I assume you mean Aramaic) "abbada ka dabra". A MUCH more likely origin from the SAME language, in my humble opinion, would be "Abra ka-dabra", meaning "create like the word" ("like the speech" might be a better translation, as DBR represents the act of speaking. The Aramaic word for "word" is miltha). From the triliteral semitic root B-R-? (? being the glottal stop represented by aleph in Hebrew) meaning "Creating" cf. the second word of the Hebrew Bible, bara. Not only does it sound more like abracadabra but it's much closer in meaning. How bout that! :-)

Sorry, but regarding the -ard suffix, the OED says "Used in Fr. as masculine formative, intensive, augmentative, and often pejorative, cf. ***, couard, canard, mallard, mouchard, vieillard." I think you're right about celebutard, however, since it's most likely celebrity + retard.