itis
The drowsy sleepy feeling you get after eating a large meal. Usual meals like big Sunday dinners, Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.
Yeah, the cartoonist appears to be somewhat misusing the ” -itis” suffix (which properly is for conditions of inflammation, or sometimes infection), as though it just meant much more generally “illness” or even “unpleasant condition”.
Tell that to my tinnitus.
There was a whole episode of the Boondocks cartoon about the Itis, more years ago than I care to consider.
Oh, and the father chowed down on a Caesar Salad in the strip. (Not named after the Caesar of the Ides, but still a common March 15 joke.)
What Consul said, but note that “itis” is a truncation of a word that would be pretty offensive if I used it so be cautious about adding it to your vocabulary. It’s a good pun though.
Agreed, it is a good pun.
Truncation? Not in my book.
Mitch, I don’t want to be too direct here and it’s a little tricky to find reliable English-language sources. The full term was used as a way of insulting slaves, particularly in the Caribbean. I understand it’s been reclaimed and lost its sting today but I’m perhaps overcautious about that sort of thing.
Another route might be to check out Wiktionary’s list of words ending in -itis, find the fictional section and see if maybe one entry stands out in particular. From there you can probably coax a search engine into providing more information, if you’re interested.
If you think that’s mistaken, given the widespread and academic claims I think you’ll need to tell me what book you’re looking at.
Andrew, thanks very much for that discussion and the reference! I went to that section of the dissertation and was quite impressed with her thoroughness and relevance — and enjoyed reading it! (I was for a while a grad student in Linguistics, so truthfully do sometimes enjoy reading academic work.)
Dr. Navarro specifically links her discussion to use of these terms in The Boondocks, and makes a convincing case that before the itis in that form was in common vernacular use, there was the longer form n@@@@@itis . That, btw, was one of my suppositions of what you were suggesting in your earlier post. I have no reason to dispute that, and agree it illuminates the whole comic and discussion.
Call it nitpicking, but what I was shaking my head at was just the directionality of the terminology truncation. The morphology of the n—–itis is very clear! The speakers who began saying that must have already been familiar with a good many medical and informal words using the suffix -itis. So that word we’re looking at is just another case of root [or stem] plus suffix.
Once people start taking that word for granted and develop the itis , which we’re saying for many speakers is still tied underlyingly to the longer form, what name would we give to the process or habit of taking just the suffix and making it a noun? I don’t know a perfect term for that, but I was goggling a bit at “truncation”, that’s all.
[I’m using root to mean a morpheme which can stand on its own, when viewed from the viewpoint of adding other bits, and stem for something already not a standalone morpheme — but in both cases what an affix gets pasted onto.] When we have a term which is made from a root or stem plus an affix, and then some speakers undo that and take just one of those two parts and use it in a novel way, if the retained part was a root then I can see calling it “truncation” — but not so easily when the retained part was the affix (suffix).
So what I am looking for might be “but note that in the itis the suffix -itis was pulled from an earlier formation in vernacular use which would be pretty offensive for me to write out here , so be cautious …”. Thank you, and indeed I’m now not going to throw around the itis!
Mitch4, it’s sort of a back formation, no? I’m not 100% comfortable with that, but it seems closer to me than “truncation”, which I think isn’t exactly wrong but doesn’t capture the flavor.
Maybe backformation works, I’m not sure what counts. But in the itis clearly itis IS a word; so it might be eligible.
But in the most familiar examples (donate, edit,…), it involves reanalysis where something that did not originate as stem+suffix (or similar) is taken that way, then the apparent suffix is removed — not itself promoted, as we have with itis.
Sorry, your objection is that you’re not familiar with the word “truncation” and don’t like it? Can’t help you there.
Come come, Andrew, I thought we were having a fine and friendly conversation, but now you reply in this tone of pique. How come?
I hoped that I had made clear my appreciation of your scholarship in explaining a relationship between the expression the itis as used in the comic shown in CIDU and other drawn or animated cartoons (expressing the idea of a certain sort of culinary overindulgence and its aftermath), and a slightly earlier vernacular expression n—–itis — and the discretion with which you explained that relationship. And I acknowledged that that relationship was new to me, and called it interesting.
I still would disagree that that relationship is best seen as a kind of shortening (or “truncation”, to use a word we both are obviously familiar with), since -itis is a very old and familiar noun-forming suffix used in the formation of some technical medical terms and also in the general culture in vernacular and sometimes jocular formations. Which is pretty obviously how n—–itis was ever formed, not terribly different from appendicitis — or better, some nonce formation like drinkingitis.
So, with all my agreement and appreciation, what is left to bring up your umbrage? Just a disagreement over the clearest characterization to give to the relationship of the two expressions; which I suggest is too small a matter to require your ire.
I’d say it’s a play on the ‘itis of March’ sounding like the “Ides of March”. I’d never heard of ‘the itis’ as a phrase for the post-feast stupor before, so I learned something today!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Urban Dictionary says: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=itis
itis
The drowsy sleepy feeling you get after eating a large meal. Usual meals like big Sunday dinners, Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.
Yeah, the cartoonist appears to be somewhat misusing the ” -itis” suffix (which properly is for conditions of inflammation, or sometimes infection), as though it just meant much more generally “illness” or even “unpleasant condition”.
Tell that to my tinnitus.
There was a whole episode of the Boondocks cartoon about the Itis, more years ago than I care to consider.
Oh, and the father chowed down on a Caesar Salad in the strip. (Not named after the Caesar of the Ides, but still a common March 15 joke.)
What Consul said, but note that “itis” is a truncation of a word that would be pretty offensive if I used it so be cautious about adding it to your vocabulary. It’s a good pun though.
Agreed, it is a good pun.
Truncation? Not in my book.
Mitch, I don’t want to be too direct here and it’s a little tricky to find reliable English-language sources. The full term was used as a way of insulting slaves, particularly in the Caribbean. I understand it’s been reclaimed and lost its sting today but I’m perhaps overcautious about that sort of thing.
I’ll link this dissertation I found from a UCSD student and gesture toward page 65: https://escholarship.org/content/qt72b9f5hk/qt72b9f5hk_noSplash_bdfda90011cf6d4b4359acbd20f0de2a.pdf?t=orzyry
Another route might be to check out Wiktionary’s list of words ending in -itis, find the fictional section and see if maybe one entry stands out in particular. From there you can probably coax a search engine into providing more information, if you’re interested.
If you think that’s mistaken, given the widespread and academic claims I think you’ll need to tell me what book you’re looking at.
Andrew, thanks very much for that discussion and the reference! I went to that section of the dissertation and was quite impressed with her thoroughness and relevance — and enjoyed reading it! (I was for a while a grad student in Linguistics, so truthfully do sometimes enjoy reading academic work.)
Dr. Navarro specifically links her discussion to use of these terms in The Boondocks, and makes a convincing case that before the itis in that form was in common vernacular use, there was the longer form n@@@@@itis . That, btw, was one of my suppositions of what you were suggesting in your earlier post. I have no reason to dispute that, and agree it illuminates the whole comic and discussion.
Call it nitpicking, but what I was shaking my head at was just the directionality of the terminology truncation. The morphology of the n—–itis is very clear! The speakers who began saying that must have already been familiar with a good many medical and informal words using the suffix -itis. So that word we’re looking at is just another case of root [or stem] plus suffix.
Once people start taking that word for granted and develop the itis , which we’re saying for many speakers is still tied underlyingly to the longer form, what name would we give to the process or habit of taking just the suffix and making it a noun? I don’t know a perfect term for that, but I was goggling a bit at “truncation”, that’s all.
[I’m using root to mean a morpheme which can stand on its own, when viewed from the viewpoint of adding other bits, and stem for something already not a standalone morpheme — but in both cases what an affix gets pasted onto.] When we have a term which is made from a root or stem plus an affix, and then some speakers undo that and take just one of those two parts and use it in a novel way, if the retained part was a root then I can see calling it “truncation” — but not so easily when the retained part was the affix (suffix).
So what I am looking for might be “but note that in the itis the suffix -itis was pulled from an earlier formation in vernacular use which would be pretty offensive for me to write out here , so be cautious …”. Thank you, and indeed I’m now not going to throw around the itis!
Mitch4, it’s sort of a back formation, no? I’m not 100% comfortable with that, but it seems closer to me than “truncation”, which I think isn’t exactly wrong but doesn’t capture the flavor.
Maybe backformation works, I’m not sure what counts. But in the itis clearly itis IS a word; so it might be eligible.
But in the most familiar examples (donate, edit,…), it involves reanalysis where something that did not originate as stem+suffix (or similar) is taken that way, then the apparent suffix is removed — not itself promoted, as we have with itis.
Sorry, your objection is that you’re not familiar with the word “truncation” and don’t like it? Can’t help you there.
Come come, Andrew, I thought we were having a fine and friendly conversation, but now you reply in this tone of pique. How come?
I hoped that I had made clear my appreciation of your scholarship in explaining a relationship between the expression the itis as used in the comic shown in CIDU and other drawn or animated cartoons (expressing the idea of a certain sort of culinary overindulgence and its aftermath), and a slightly earlier vernacular expression n—–itis — and the discretion with which you explained that relationship. And I acknowledged that that relationship was new to me, and called it interesting.
I still would disagree that that relationship is best seen as a kind of shortening (or “truncation”, to use a word we both are obviously familiar with), since -itis is a very old and familiar noun-forming suffix used in the formation of some technical medical terms and also in the general culture in vernacular and sometimes jocular formations. Which is pretty obviously how n—–itis was ever formed, not terribly different from appendicitis — or better, some nonce formation like drinkingitis.
So, with all my agreement and appreciation, what is left to bring up your umbrage? Just a disagreement over the clearest characterization to give to the relationship of the two expressions; which I suggest is too small a matter to require your ire.
I’d say it’s a play on the ‘itis of March’ sounding like the “Ides of March”. I’d never heard of ‘the itis’ as a phrase for the post-feast stupor before, so I learned something today!