Wednesday November 14, 2007
Retard, craptastic, spooktacular, etc
NOTES FROM THE LANGUAGE UNDERGROUND
By GRANT BARRETT
A LONG-STANDING childhood favourite putdown is retarded.
It originally meant “poorly developed physically, mentally, or socially, especially when compared to people of the same age”. These days, though, calling somebody retarded usually means you think they’re less than they should be. They’re stupid.
When you’re 10 years old (or 37), lots of things seem retarded and retarded people are retards, a word that has not been a polite one in its four decades of existence, nor has the out-of-fashion retardo, which has the same meaning. They’re synonyms for dummy, idiot, nincompoop. Not nice.
But, as slang tends to do, neither retarded nor retard has stayed put. Retarded, for one thing, has taken on more meanings, such as “outrageous, unfair, or unreasonable”.
If I say, “It’s retarded that the store is closed. It was supposed to open hours ago.”, then it’s a stupid situation. The store being closed is outrageous behaviour on the part of the shopkeeper.
“It’s retarded that steak costs so much” means that, well, beefsteak shouldn’t cost so much. The cost is unreasonable.
“He spends a retarded amount of money on books” would describe me very well. It means I spend too much money buying books.
You could also say, “Dude, that was a kick-ass party. It was just retarded.” It means that it was a great party: it was both outrageously and unreasonably good. (Dude is a common way for young Americans to address each other. Kick-ass is what’s jokingly known as an “anal emphatic” – we’ll talk about it in a future column.)
Retard, on the other hand, has become just tard in a process known as aphaeresis, meaning that the beginning of the word has been removed. A tard is the same as a retard.
It has also become the multi-use suffix -tard(ed), extracting almost whole the root that originally meant “slow” in Latin, which now carries with it the meaning of “stupid”. It’s what we call a formative – a tiny piece of language that contains meaning but isn’t a word on its own.
Motarded, for example, is used among American military personnel to describe a person who is “excessively enthusiastic about being a soldier to the point of stupidity”. It probably comes from the mo- in moronic, motivated, or more plus retarded.
A new recruit who is motarded is very gung-ho: eager to fight, eager to shoot weapons, and eager to out-soldier everybody else.
Smacktard is another -tard word and yet another name for a stupid person, perhaps one who is acting as if they are intoxicated by smack, the drug heroin. Some people use it in a way that suggests that a smacktard is a person who is behaving so stupidly that you want to smack them across the mouth.
There are, of course, many more uses of the -tard suffix, including a coarse few we’ll decline to mention in a family newspaper.
A suffix that behaves similarly to -tard is -tastic, taken from fantastic and, like the full word, in informal English it means “very good or appealing”.
You can find it in fun-tastic from the 1930s and in a variety of nonce coinages – meaning they were used for a single purpose and didn’t spread sufficiently to become part of Standard English. Perhaps using phonetastic to suggest you’re in for an exciting time on the telephone was more appropriate when phones were more of a novelty.
The -tastic coinage with the most legs, as they say in Hollywood of things that are likely to succeed (think of a fast horse), is craptastic.
The verb crap is a mildly vulgar way of saying “to defecate”. It’s something you could probably say in front of your mother, who might only give you a look that says, “Did you have to use that word?”
The noun crap is nearly always used as a name for something poorly made or done. Taking it as root and adding -tastic means you have a conflict of intentions in the resulting word craptastic. Something that is craptastic is purported to be fantastic, but in your opinion it is dreadful, cheesy, or lame.
Similarly, some English-speakers have chipped off -tacular, from spectacular, meaning “visually exciting” or “a visually exciting event.”. As far back as the 1950s, it was combined with words to make them seem more exciting. Advertisers especially liked to do this, as they did with -tastic.
Spooktacular is a particularly popular noun and adjective using -tacular, especially around the holiday of Halloween. Spook means “ghost” and to spook means “to scare”, so, presumably, a spooktacular would frighten the pants off you.
Crap has also been combined with -tacular to form craptacular, with the same nuances as craptastic: you use it to describe something that is supposed to be spectacular but isn’t.
If the word spectacular were properly divided according to its roots, it would result in spectacul, from the Latin spectacul-um (“a show, spectacle, something worth observing”) and the Latin suffix –ar (“of a kind; belonging to”). We wouldn’t have -tacular at all.
But of course, English is a vagabond with a sharp knife. It takes words and parts of words where it pleases.
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