953: -aholic and -iversary (New Suffixes) Jul 19, 2017

English has a lot of suffixes, but most of those haven't changed much in centuries, and rarely are new ones used. Certain lexical classes like nouns, verbs, and adjectives etc. tend to gain the most new words while it is uncommon for new words to be added to others, like conjunctions and articles because they tend to relate to syntax but not the semantics of what someone is trying to communicate. Affixes, though not a part of speech, also are not created often because they tend to be used to communicate something more about syntax as well. The suffix '-(a)holic', however, is not only used to indicate that, for example, a part of speech in the way that '-ness' indicates that a word that was once an adjective is a noun; instead it also relates to the idea of addiction, as in 'workaholic' or 'chocoholic' (though not cat-holic, yet). The suffix was taken from 'alcoholic', even though the only suffix in that word is '-ic' added to 'alcohol', making it a new affix. This is not the only new suffix in English, such as '-iversary' drawn from 'anniversary', as in 'adoptiversary', a recent trend on Twitter which communicates the anniversary of something, in this case pet-adoption. It should be noted that these could perhaps be considered combining forms instead of suffixes because they add semantic meaning.

Comment if you have any others that you have found yourself.