Back Formation

While reading some previous information from class, I came across back-formation in the Harley text. When I saw the word a few weeks ago, I pretty much overlooked it and kept on reading. When I saw it again this week, it struck me as crazy-odd. I read it, and the explanation of it and thought, well okay obviously I do not have the mental strength to understand Harley so, I took to Google. I did hold out the slightest of hopes that there was a "back-formation for dummies," sadly that has not been written, yet. I went to about 25 sites and read the various explanations and definitions and thought, okay I need a nap - this is about as clear as mud! I have the meaning, or the description of what back-formation is and even some examples but, really and I mean REALLY what is it?! If there isn't a George Micheal (class TA) following me around telling me which word is a back-formation and which words are front-formation (totally not a thing but, definitely think it works in this sentence) then HOW is a girl to know?! The meaning I had to go on was the following: Back-formation is when a new word (or more exactly a form of a word) is created from an existing word usually by deleting something on the beginning or end of the word. Usually, the thing that is deleted looks like a affix (-er, un, etc.), and so this "affix" is removed, and we step "back" toward a "root" form of the word...though that root may not have actually existed historically. Not a back-formation, but an example of suffixes and roots, just for a reminder: un-lock-able. un- is a prefix, lock is the root, and -able is a suffix. Prefixes and suffixes are both types of affixes. So, for an example of back-formation, take the verb edit. Edit, in fact, did not exist years ago. There were editors, but no one was described as editing something. The -or/-er suffixes commonly denote noun forms of verbs in English (writer, worker, inquisitor, etc.), so it was quite easy to strip away the -or from editor and be left with the new verb form edit. Other examples of this: babysitting -> babysit resurrection -> resurrect burglary -> burgle televise -> television Yeah, so not very clear, in relation to my complaint which is this: We have the word babysitting, and it allows for the back-formation of babysit. How do we KNOW that? How do we know that babysitting was a word prior to babysitting being a word? Would we have to check the OED to see the first date of usage to discover which came first? I think in my brain somewhere it makes sense but, I can't explain it without wondering myself...which came FIRST the chicken or the egg?! I went to the smartest person I know personally, in the study of language at least, and one who quite possibly has the best beard of any TA at the U of A (said TA shall remain nameless as I did not get his permission to quote him or his smarticles on my blog). I posed the question above to him and he gave N-grams a new purpose in my life. The long and short of it is that while cruising the chip aisle at Walmart, and shamelessly watching a woman threaten to make her kid go to bed at 2pm for a week over a bag of Cheetos, I will most likely NOT have to decide if any of her warnings are words created by back-formation. As super fly, bearded guy put it: "You're over thinking it girl slow down!" This is a linguistics term, used in the linguistic (etymology) world considering I am only vacationing here, and not planning to move in; I'm really okay with just knowing what it means. So, if there are others out there losing sleep over back-formation and therapy/medication has not eased your suffering, know that there is help: N-gram! Put in your two words babysitting & babysit and track usage, below it shows that babysitting was in "use" and babysit does not show up until 1947.