No Ham in Your Hamburger? It's a Cranwich.

The word "alcohol" originates in Arabic as "al-kuhul" (said to mean "tincture of antimony") and comes into English through Old Spanish. "Alcoholic," as in "possessing the qualities of alcohol," is an old word, but "alcoholic" does not acquire the meaning "addicted to alcohol" until 1880. In recent years, "holic", which had no independent existence, has become detached from its word of origin and appears as an enclitic or suffix to produce such useful coinages as "workaholic," "shopaholic," "chocoholic, ""sexaholic."  Holic is now so well-established as an indicator of compulsive behavior that it's quite permissible to take almost any noun, slap a holic onto it, and invent a decipherable adjective. A vacationer, for example, could be a beachaholic, a swimaholic, or a sandaholic.

A fate similar to that of alcoholic befell the word sandwich. Originally a town in Kent, Sandwich was later the name of a culinary-minded Earl. "Sand" is self-explanatory and "wich" designated a tract of salty land. Wich, like holic, has set out on its own career path and has generated such apparently essential new words as "bagelwich" and "croissantwich." A croissantwich consists of a quantity of something or other between two slices of croissant. If a bagelwich is made of bagel and a croissantwich of croissant, of what is a sandwich made? The obvious answer: bread, which, by a quirk of language, is signified by the morpheme "sand." 

There's no precise linguistic term for words created by the addition of holic and wich, but they are closely related to a group known as "cranberry morphemes." (A morpheme is the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning.) Why cranberry?  Compare the two words "blackberry" and "cranberry."  Blackberry resolves into two free morphemes: black and berry. Cranberry, however, is a horse of another color, because "cran" all by its lonesome has no meaning at all. (It did, once upon a time; cranberries were eaten by cranes.) "Cran" is therefore a "bound morpheme." Unlike the black in blackberry, which functions quite well on its own, "cran" is "bound" because if it were free it would be meaningless. Technically, a cranberry morpheme is a bound morpheme that exists in only one lexeme. Workaholic is a variety of cranberry morpheme because, like cran, holic cannot stand alone; but while cranberry is unique, words containing holic and wich occur in numerous manifestations.    

It's therefore the case that English does not have an adequate word for workaholic, bagelwich and their proliferating analogues. To supply this need, I nominate "cranwich" (a coinage that is less than minute old as this is written and is therefore a neonate neologism). The definition: a "cranwich" is a cranberry morpheme that has gone wild and no longer limits itself to a single appearance (like cran), but proliferates (like holic) -- and is easily proliferable.   

A hamburger was originally from Hamburg. At some point, burger detached itself from hamburger, went wild, and produced such cranwiches as cheeseburger, baconburger, bocaburger, and gardenburger. Along with these new words comes a rather paradoxical phenomenon. Just as the sand in sandwich now means bread, so the ham in hamburger means beef. This linguistic oddity will some day be a thing of the past: more and more, the word hamburger is being replaced by the less amusing but more precise beefburger. (Still beyond the horizon: breadwich.) It's impossible to say why the hamburger yielded burger while the frankfurter (from Frankfort) failed to cranwich: why do we have chicken franks and tofu franks rather than chickenfurters and tofufurters? 

Other cranwiches of note: Dracula has produced blackula and chocula: "ula" seems to mean something both frightening and funny (although not in the case of uvula. A scary uvula would be a uvulula). Godzilla produced hogzilla and bridezilla, coinages which might lead the cranwich-naive to conclude that the god in godzilla means god, which it certainly does not. Marathon, the Greek word for fennel, was also the name of the city where the Athenians defeated the Persians in 490 BC and from which the messenger Phidippides ran twenty-six miles to bring the good news home. "Thon" has now severed its relationship with marathon and, as a suffix, has produced innumerable cranwiches such as as knit-a-thon, jog-a-thon, dance-a-thon, blog-a-thon, and, believe it or not, masturbate-a-thon. The "Mc" in McDonald's has not only generated "mcmansions" and "mcjobs," but has also opened up the possibility that an inferior or sub-standard cranwich could someday be called a mccranwich. A compendious display of mccranwiches would be a mccranwichorama.   

March 24.   We're in Washington D. C.  On a cab ride we passed the Watergate complex, the presence of which reminded me that I'd failed to mention one of the major cranwiches of the last decade. The "gate" in Watergate has become a suffix that denotes a scandal, as in Korea-gate, Iran-gate, Plamegate or, my favorite (I like odd rhymes), debate-gate. Debate-gate, now largely forgotten, occurred during the 1980 presidential campaign, when the fatuous hypocrite and ex-Jesse Helms speechwriter George Will, using a stolen Democratic briefing book, coached Ronald Reagan for his debate with Jimmy Carter, then later went on TV to praise Reagan's "thoroughbred performance."   

Comments

[zekeinah mamrah]

Why not call it a sandwich morpheme?

[Daniel Martin]

I am reminded of a Simpson's episode in which they make fun of the -holic cranwich. Homer laments "I'm a rage-aholic! I'm addicted to rage-ahol!"

[Sean Robertson]

Re: ...zilla, we must also not forget about Mozilla - quite a few companies have coined cranwiches for their own names or those of their products.