Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Logolatry?

A couple of days ago, Visual Thesaurus' word-of-the-day was anthropolatry - the worship of man.  Apparently you can add the suffix -latry to a Latin-based word and turn it into a word for worship of that thing.  Idolatry, for instance, is the one we probably know best.  Autolatry denotes worship of self.  Theolatry means worship of a deity.

Hmmmm... Could it be that any word that ends with -ology can be modified to end with -olatry?

Technolatry?  Laborolatry?  Stultolatry?  Worship of technology, work, and stupidity, respectively.  I'm kind of liking this power...

But it seems that the makers of dictionaries draw the line of propriety somewhere before arriving at the portals of these wonderful words.  But, hey - every word has to come from somewhere, which means that at some point, someone made it up, right?  And what evidence is there that any of those people were more entitled to invent words than I am?  I, for one, reject both predecessolatry and antecessolatry.

All of this makes me wonder whether I might be a logolator... no, wait, logos is Greek.  Can you mix Latin and Greek?  Is it OK to stuff grape leaves with paella?  No, I think I won't take that risk today.  I'm already cooking up enough new recipes (recipelatry?)  On the other hand, if -logy is a Greek suffix, and it's regularly added to Latin nouns, what would be the harm in working it the other way around?  I should be free to level accusations of toiletrylatry when I walk through a department store!

All of which just goes to reinforce the probability that I am guilty of loculatry, which could either be worship of words or worship of talking.

And then, of course, there's the ultimate extension of this whole ramble - latrolatry - worship of worship.  But that's a post for another day...

1 comment:

Somervillein said...

What a pity that your astute post has to wait seven years for a comment. Thanks a lot from a logophile.