One Step Now Education

August 2, 2024

thespiphilic

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This past winter, I was reading a biography of the actor/comedian/director and husband of Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols. In it, the actor Kevin Kline gave a quote, “He loved actors, he was thespiphilic.” I had never heard nor seen that word, so I knew it was ripe to investigate.

Meaning

What is this word’s meaning and how does the word function?

I hope you are ready for a challenge. Perhaps I sniffed one out here and that’s why I noted it for later. There is no entry for this word in Collins, Merriam-Webster, nor the Oxford. That clever Kevin Kline has made one up. I’ll have to do a lot of work in structure to determine the meaning of this word.

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However, I’m hypothesizing it has something to do with “loving actors.” I’m also hypothesizing it’s an adjective, because it ends with <-ic>.

Structure

What are the elements that make up this word’s structure?

A few other words I know are going to help me with my hypothesis here.

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thesp + i + phile/ + ic

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I know the first element from words like thespian, which is a word meaning “actor” or describing things from the theater world. The second base element is present in words like philosophy, “lover of wisdom,” or logophile, “lover of words.”

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No listing in Etymonline for this one either to prove or disprove my hypothesis. The odd piece here is the connecting vowel letter <i>. Typically, when two Greek bases compound, there will be a connecting vowel letter <o>, as in thermophile or the aforementioned philosophy. Here though, the author Mark Harris chose to spell it with an <i>, the traditional Latin connecting vowel letter.

Relatives

What are the word’s relatives and history?

When you have a compound, you can create a matrix from either base. A matrix is a collection of words that share a base and a root. Relatives for <thesp> might include thespianism. The element <-ism> comes from Greek as well. A recent neologism from 1989 listed in the Oxford is synthespian which is a computer-generated actor.

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Interestingly, the word thespian itself is an eponym. Eponyms are derived from names. Here, the word is derived from the Greek father of tragedy and drama, Thespis. The word first appeared in English in the late 1600s but really started to take off in the mid 1800s. It has diminished somewhat since that peak, but use has leveled out in the last ten years or so. The newest version of the Oxford dictionary has some pretty cool frequency graphs now.

Graphemes

What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about its graphemes and phonology?

We show phones in square brackets; we show phonemes in slash brackets. Phones are the physical production; phonemes are the mental categorization of these sounds.

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The phones [p] and [b] are made in similar places, the lips. They are bilabial. They are also made in the same manner. Air is built up and then the pressure is quickly released. They are stop sounds, or plosives. However, these two sounds differ in voicing. The [p] is unvoiced whereas the [b] is voiced.

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In some environments, like in the word thespian, a [p] can sound more like a [b]. We see the same in the shorter word spit. The [p] can seem as if it has a little more air at the beginning of words like pit or pie. It can also be unreleased, like at the end of stop. The first is often represented as [p], the second as [p^h] (the <h> is raised like an exponent, but formatting won’t allow me to type it that way) and the third as [p̚]. These are all allophones of the phoneme /p/. The phoneme /p/ is the category to which all of these allophones belong.

Next Steps

Where do I go next?

What other words can you determine the meaning of just from the elements that make up its structure?

What other Greek compounds can you find?

What other eponyms might be interesting to explore? Try sandwich or quixotic.

New words are coined all of the time; we call them neologisms. Eventually some will be added to the dictionary while others fade away.

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Stay curious,

Brad

One Step Now Education

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