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.
While I have you, can I ask you something? I’ll be quick.
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