The surreptitious history of -licious
The year 1992, as Arnold Zwicky observes, was a high-water mark for the jocular suffix -(V)licious. That morpholiciousyear brought us not only babeliciousof Wayne's World fame and thehiphop group Blackalicious, but also the flexible neologism bootylicious. Snoop Dogg used it ina guest appearance on Dr. Dre's 1992 album TheChronic in a pejorative fashion to diss a fellow rapper: "Yourbark was loud, but your bite wasn't vicious / And them rhymes you werekickin were quite bootylicious." Beyoncé Knowles and Destiny's Child would later celebrate an ameliorative interpretation of the word(more callipygianthan steatopygic,let's say) with their 2001 single "Bootylicious."But Beyoncé didn't coin the term even in its positive sense(despite the claims of some silly newsstoriesearlier this year). The OxfordEnglish Dictionary has print citations for the 'sexually attractive'meaning of bootylicious backto 1994.
Yes, bootylicious is intheonline edition of the OED now, and it has been since September 2004. (Since then, it hasalsoentered the latest editions of the NewOxford American Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English.) Babelicious is in the OED too, witha first citation slightly predating the 1992 release of Wayne's World: it appeared in thebook Wayne's World: Extreme Closeupa year before the movie came out. Both entriescross-reference another new addition to the dictionary: the combiningform -(a)licious, defined as'embodying the qualities denoted or implied by the first element to adelightful or attractive degree' (as in hunkalicious, attested from 1989).The OED takes this formation back tothe '50s, but the long and largely undetected history of -(V)licious can be traced back even further thanthat.
Asearly as 1958, S.J. Perelman could write satirically in the New Yorker about a slogan-writercoming up with this bit of ad copy: "Victor Hugo—the Soup That BabiesYour Palate. Appeteasing—Goodylicious." Perelman was mocking theMadison Avenue penchant for silly blends like appeteasing (appetizing + teasing) and goodylicious (goody + delicious). And ad copy is indeedwhere we can find earlier examples of -(V)licious as a combining form orblend component. The OED gives a 1951 cite for an ad appearing in theIronwood (Michigan) Daily Globe: "It's the dog food that packs allthe nutrition a dog needs into one dog-licious meal." (Needless to say,dog-licious here means'delicious to a dog,' not 'delicious like a dog.') That line is from anad for the Kasco brand of dog food, and the ever-expanding Newspaperarchive database nowfinds earlier examples of dog-liciousin Kasco ads (two of which adorn this page) going back to 1949 inpapers such as the Kingsport (Tennessee) News and the Charleston (WestVirginia) Gazette.
Much as fantastic beganspawning other -tastic formsby first shifting one vowel to funtastic(see thispost for a discussion), many of the early -licious forms weren't too farremoved from delicious, involving a change of just the initial consonant. Forinstance, a rayon crepe "tea dress" from Mary Muffet was advertised inthe Oct. 23, 1941 Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press as tea-licious. (Andlater in 1963 the Los Angeles Times carried a recipe for a tea-licious, i.e., tea-flavored,pie.) An ad in the Oct. 15, 1952 Syracuse Herald-Journal trumpetedDowney's Honey Butter as bee-licious,while the Albuquerque Tribune of Feb. 24, 1955 carried a notice for sea-licious breaded shrimp fromLucky Supermarkets. All of these examples are helped along by theemphatic form of deliciouswith stress on the first syllable, frequently represented as dee-licious in advertising of theearly to mid-20th century.
An even earlier example of -(V)liciousfrom Newspaperarchive doesn't involve a simple consonant switch from dee-licious and also doesn't come from adcopy. The Nov. 8, 1933 Syracuse Herald features a recipe from a readerfor applelicious, a dessertconsisting of vanilla wafers and sliced apples. The same recipe turnsup in the Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle Telegram the following year, so applelicious clearly got around.
Going back further still, the AmericanPeriodicals Series reveals a punny example of the -(V)licious formation while it wasstill very much in its infancy. This poor excuse for a joke appeared inthe New York Observer and Chronicleof Jan. 3, 1878, in the "Odds & Ends" column:
There are beautiful warm soda springs inColorado, and people who gobathing in them at once exclaim: "Oh! but this is soda-licious!"
So delicious, soda-licious, get it? Yep, pretty bad joke. But itmust have had some staying power, because by 1911 there were drugstores in different parts of the country (Ada, Oklahoma, and FortWayne, Indiana, if not elsewhere) that advertised their carbonateddrinks in local newspapers as soda-licious.Notably, the sodaliciousblend was prominent enough to attract the attention of suchword-watchers as H.L. Menckenand EricPartridge. So perhaps this form laid the groundwork for latermorpholiciousness.
Nowadays, if you want to get a sense of the productivity of -(V)licious, just head over to MarkPeters' Wordlustitude,where recent in-the-wild discoveries include kegelicious,stigmatalicious,tentaclicious,non-suckalicious,crony-licious,conjugalicious,and many more. What once was an occasional delectation is now just a bit too overkillicious.
Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at September 5, 2006 12:47 AM
