The other day I was on a Web page that accepted comments and I noticed that, in the form where you register to be a commenter, it asked you to select a “nick-name.” The hyphenation of back-up was defensible, but nickname is the long-established correct form and there just shouldn’t be a
hyphen. Unfortunately I lost track of which Web site this was so I can’t send you there to see for yourself, or go back myself to see if maybe it was a site run by people who do not speak English natively.

But that encounter with nickname reminded me of this entry I wrote on nickname for the old Word Site back in 1997, explaining where nicknames came from.

A nickname was originally an ekename, from the Old and Middle English eke, meaning “additional.” By a process called metanalysis, the n from the an became “misplaced,” resulting by the early 15th century in forms such as neke name and nycke name. The modern, single-word form nickname appears for the first time in print in the early 1700s. Metanalysis—common in the development of the English language—also turned an ewte into a newt and, working in the other direction,  a nauger into an auger.

Eke, once a venerable and indispensable part of the language, was eventually replaced by words such as additional (which did not appear until the seventeenth century) and also. It survives in expressions such as “eke out a living,” where it refers to supplementing or augmenting something or to making something last longer.

A friend of mine was recently venting some workplace frustration to a coworker, who advised her not to get “flustrated.” When she told me this story, we both assumed, since the coworker in question had a history of mispronunciations and malapropisms, that she was simply inadvertently conflating “flustered” and “flustrated.” As I thought more about it, though, I was struck by the fact that flustrated perfectly captured the situation—my friend was getting flustered as a result of her frustration. If flustrated wasn’t a real word it needed to be.

I turned first to the OED and found that flustrate (”vulgar or jocular” in usage) is quite old, with flustrated appearing in print in 1712. The OED lists the derivation as FLUSTER + ATE and lists the alternate spelling flusterate. Merriam-Webster game the same etymology, while Random House Webster’s suggested a combination of fluster and
frustrate. The Random House Mavens contend that the word is just an elaborate form of fluster but admit that some recent examples do suggest a blend or a confusion with frustrate.

A Google search turns up over 12,000 hits, most from people complaining about other people using the word, and/or opining (incorrectly) that it is a “made up” word. One newspaper article in particular caught my eye. Writing in The Morning Sun,^* Sue Metzger says that

Sometimes two similar words are mistakenly combined into a single word that exceeds the boundaries of meaning. “Flustrated” is a non-word created from “flustered” and “frustrated.” Flustered means “confused, nervous, excited”; frustrated means “disappointed, defeated, obstructed.”

It may be possible to entertain all those feelings simultaneously, but creating a technically correct adverb/verb—“frustratingly flustered”—is as awkward as “flustrated” is wrong. Maybe we should just say “confused and disappointed.”

Metzger’s logic escapes me here: if it’s possible to “entertain all those feelings simultaneously,” then flustrated doesn’t exceed the boundaries of meaning, and if the word captures the feeling, how is it “wrong”? “Confused and disappointed” isn’t the state we’re going for here—to be flustrated is to be “agitated by disappointment or dissatisfaction.”

I stand by my original impression: as an elaboration of flustered, flustrated is silly and dull. But as a combination of flustered and frustrated, it’s superb. So be careful to use it only in just the right situation.

Buttload is used to express a vague but large quantity; it is often assumed to be a meaningless word (stemming from butt in the sense of buttocks) of the sort we’re so fond of coining based on vulgar words (cf. shitload, or the myriad words and phrases based on em>fuck). A buttload is, as it turns out, a more or less quantifiable measure, in no way related to the buttocks or their capacity.

The butt referred to here is a heavy, two-wheeled cart, drawn by oxen or horses (for example, a dung-butt is a cart used to haul manure). A butt-load is the quantity that your average butt can hold. In the earliest written description of a butt-load (1796), this is said to be “about six seams.” A seam is “a pack-horse load,” the exact quantity originally depending on both the locale and the item being measured. A seam of glass, for example, was 120 pounds; a seam of apples was 9 pecks. Later, a seam was more or less standardized at 3 hundredweight of hay or manure, or 2 hundredweight of straw. So a buttload of manure would be roughly 2,016 pounds (a hundredweight is about 112 pounds; 3 hundredweight makes a seam; 6 seams is a buttload).

Butt, by the way, is not a shortened form of buttock. Rather, as near as anyone can tell, buttock is formed from em>butt by addition of the suffix -ock, which is used to form diminutives. This is the same -ock found in words such as hillock (a small hill), tussock (originally a tuft of hair), haddock, and bullock (originally a young bull, later a castrated bull; bullock comes from the Old English bulluc—the -uc suffix is a variant form of -ock).