[ID: a thread of tweets by Amelia Bloody Rose @AmeliaRoseWrite from 3/23/19:
TANGENT: I really want to do an analysis of the apparently productive suffix ’-ception’ which, when appended to a noun, gives the noun the meaning of recursivity or “nesting.”
It’s a reanalysis of “inception,” which means “beginning,” but it specifically refers to the movie of the same name, in which an inception is the planting of an idea in someone’s head. However, in order to do this, you have to travel through nested layers of someone’s dreams
I’ve seen people (@egoraptor, notably) complain that using “-ception” to refer to nesting is inaccurate, since the word isn’t actually referring to the recursive dreams but rather the planting of an idea.
But that misses the point; the “-ception” suffix, as applied to nested items, is derived not from the general word, but rather from a specific reference to the movie–a movie whose big idea WAS recursion or nesting.
And so you’re not referencing the word, but its specific use. Kinda like how if I describe a “Frankenstein’s” whatever, you’re probably not going to wonder why I’m using an old German name to describe something cobbled together from spare parts.
“-ception” also comes from a longstanding tradition of reanalyzing and repurposing the ends of words as suffixes. Others include “-athon” from “marathon,” “-oholic” from “alcoholic,” and lately “-quel” from “sequel.”
It’s the sort of thing I love–that a very complicated concept (recursive layers of something) can be conveyed by even just a part of a word.
So whenever you hear people talk about “there’s a German word for [complicated concept]” or whatever, remember, English has a specific suffix for “recursive layers of an object or concept” that can be applied to ANYTHING.
(Also, as an aside, one of my favorite uses of “-ception” is referring to a turducken as “birdception.” Everything about that is just wonderfully preposterous)
