Trendy Suffixes, for Fun and Profit

My daughter Maria Yagoda, an editor for foodandwine.com, recently wrote about going to a Red Lobster and consuming the restaurant chain’s new menu item, a deep-fried lobster tail on a waffle, drenched in maple syrup. (It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.) She observed, “plopping deep-fried lobster on a savory, crispy, cheddar-forward waffle is an otherworldly move, one that feels like it could end in death. But it didn’t, to its credit.”

I was struck by the term cheddar-forward and asked her about it. She replied, “So that’s a fun thing to do where it’s sort of making fun of fancy wine language/ways of describing taste, like ‘fruit-forward.’” Right, of course.

Checking the New York Times archives, I found the earliest use of that phrase to be in a 2001 piece by the wine columnist Frank Prial. The context suggests it had already become a cliché: “Words like plump and sweet and fruit-forward (oh, execrable term!) are rarely applied to Washington cabernets.”

The other similar term that comes to mind is fashion-forward, for which the Oxford English Dictionary has a definition: “designating clothing, a person, etc., at the cutting edge of fashion.” Even more so than fruit-forward, it gives off the odor of advertising and hype. The Times’s first use, accordingly, is a quote from a manufacturer in reference to a 1979 fashion that (thankfully) did not last, the dress-shoe-sandal for men; its target customer is described as “the younger, fashion‐forward customer.”

It got me thinking about other trendy suffixes. One that’s big in business jargon is -facing, especially public-facing. It seems to have stemmed from the earlier client-facing, the first citation for which in the OED is a 1972 article from Social Science Review (“The relationship of each agency to the various coordinative structures, the patterns of funding, and the associational affiliations of executive and client-facing staff were examined”) and customer-facing (first cite 1986). The OED doesn’t have an entry for public-facing, but the first use in the Google Books database is from a 1999 article in a British journal of information science: The British Library “is a public-facing organisation that receives in excess of 500,000 visits a year.” By now it is ubiquitous, with 16 Google News hits over the past 24 hours. Some of the most recent:

• “So there’s a little bit of frustration there, where we want to support and we do support these more public-facing initiatives, but at the same time, it seems sometimes that the attention or support isn’t supplied to the actual art department.” —University of North Carolina art professor
• We believe that this moment presents an opportunity for the museum to review — and fully acknowledge — its fraught history of acquisition, exhibition, staffing, and self-presentation with a view to reconstructing its operations, both internal and public-facing.” —open letter to the Brooklyn Museum, after it hired a white woman to be its curator of African art.
• “Prior to the change, any app could use the Pages API to read posts or comments from any public-facing Facebook page.” —The Verge
• “In addition to reporting their gender wage gap data to the government, companies were also required to post the numbers, along with a statement, on a public-facing website."—CNN article.

Client-facing and customer-facing make a certain amount of sense, but (and please correct me if I’m missing something) public-facing would appear to mean exactly the same thing as public.

The other popular suffix that comes to mind is -positive, specifically in sex-positive, which the OED defines as having or promoting “a tolerant, progressive, or candid attitude towards sex and sexuality.” The first citation is from a 1997 book: “The safe-sex campaigns were a sex-positive response to the illness.” “The illness” is presumably AIDS, suggesting the cleverness of the coinage: sex-positive takes the grim HIV-positive and repurposes it, well, positively.

By now sex-positive is a cliché in full, as suggested by the fact that it has been used no fewer than 17 times to describe Blockers, despite the fact that, as I write, the movie has not yet opened. (From Slate: “The night ends on a sex-positive but not sex-obsessed note, with each of the girls doing what makes the most sense to them.”)

My current favorite suffix isn’t a suffix at all. I heard about it from my former student Rachel Curry, who posted on Facebook the she “found unparalleled amusement in the fact that Stravenue is an approved suffix in the US.” I replied in full professor mode, sniffing that “in my understanding that’s not a suffix. A suffix gets connected to the end of the word by a hyphen ... or just adding it on to the word.” She kindly explained to me that “street suffix” is indeed a real thing, describing the word that comes after the name of the street. So: road, place, boulevard, and, yes, stravenue, which, according to an article in Atlas Obscura, is Tucson-specific (to throw in another suffix). In that city, the east-west streets are called street and the north-south ones avenue; stravenue has been used since 1949 for the roughly 30 that run diagonally.

Clearly, the thing to do with these bad boys is double them up. Anybody want to meet me at Sex-positive-facing Stravenue?