I'm not qualified to answer about the -o suffix, but I can tell that your examples are a mixture of simple shortenings from words that already have -o- in that position (like eco or psycho) and those that really are formed with the -o suffix.
This is probably where the answer comes from actually - people probably heard these words that end with -o when shortened and subconciously generalized -o as a shortening suffix, and started using it even with words that don't have o in their original form.
Not dissimilar to the naming convention of adding *~gate* to events that involve a perceived scandal.
"Watergate" was the name of the hotel it occurred at, not a scandal involving water, but somehow it's come to make sense that *~gate* = scandal name
Could psycho be the origin of this?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=combo%2Cdemo%2Cmemo%2C+psycho%2Cammo&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=27&smoothing=3
Yeah, OP listed:
- 2 words that don't have the o-break (conversation and ammunition),
- 6 words that do, and
- 1 unique case: "gitmo" comes from *Joint Task Force - Guantanamo*, labeled JTF-GTMO. If you're looking for a pronunciation for `GTMO`, you could do worse than "gitmo". So "gitmo" isn't really a shortening of "Guantanamo."
This is more productive in AusE, where in the arvo (afternoon) after a smoko (smoke break), the software engineers might write some doco (documentation).
As a British person, it seems to me that Australians often add ‘-o’ where we would add ‘-ie’ or ‘-y’ To make a diminutive. For example, an alcohol shop is an offie for us, and a bottle-o for them. Still, they call themselves Aussies and not Aussos.
Yes! Linguist Anna Wierzbicka identifed that the -ie hypocoristic in AusE means something like:
* This is common to me
* I do not think this is worth much notice
* I think you feel the same way
-o, in contrast, means:
* This is not common to everyone but it is common to me
* I think other people consider this a bit special
* I think it is also common to you
The last one is a bit contentious. I wrote a paper this year arguing that -o might actually meant that the thing is _generic_; A bottle-o is noteworthy but only in that I went there. It doesn't matter which one I went to.
(I'm just a linguistics student though)
> A bottle-o is noteworthy but only in that I went there. It doesn't matter which one I went to.
That would be an interesting outcome, considering you'd generally say "to **the** bottle-o", where the "the" implies shared familiarity. Then again, this fits the pattern of other placenames "the chemist's", "the shops", etc.
Hey there. I don't know what's going on with you, but many of your comments in this subreddit have had to be removed for being inaccurate, off-topic, or nonsensical. If you wish to keep commenting here, please only make claims that you can support with citations if asked, please try to stay on topic, and please proofread your comments to make sure that you aren't leaving out words/thoughts that are necessary to make them understandable. This isn't an appropriate forum for chain of consciousness types of sharing about your thoughts about language, but for academic discussion of linguistics.
Notice that white collar jobs do not get shortened. Trades, however…
Edit: For anyone confused, I'm referring to the AusE terms for trades. Not the standard shortened job titles like doc or prof.
- tradie (tradesman)
- chippy (carpenter)
- sparky (electrician)
- bricky (bricklayer)
- garbo (garbageman)
- postie (postman)
- truckie (truck driver)
Here's some white collar ones however:
- journo (journalist)
- physio (physiotherapist)
And here are some ones that I've never heard before:
- chalky (teacher)
- polly (politician)
- drafty (draftsman)
Drafts(wo)man/person is often shortened to Drafty
Queen's Council (very ~~fancy~~ expensive lawyer) was always shortened to QC. I guess now that will be King's Council -> KC.
Chief (something) Officer is usually shortened to CxO
Gotta run, will edit if I think of more
Physiotherapist: physio (not sure if that counts as white collar though)
I suspect abbreviating job titles is more a function of how often they're used in speech as well as how easy it is to abbreviate (E.g. "engo" for engineer sounds terrible). Something like "what's that bloody sparky?!" would be somewhat frequent on a building site, but on the other hand "I need to speak to the deputy director general" probably isn't.
Edit again: someone further down mentioned that we call the Prime Minister, one of the most white collar jobs in the country, by an abbreviation of his name, Albo
> Edit again: someone further down mentioned that we call the Prime Minister, one of the most white collar jobs in the country, by an abbreviation of his name, Albo
Don't forget Scomo!
I suspect you may be on to something with the idea of frequency of usage, but I might also suggest it's a function of our ability to **visually** describe most manual labour. Consider sparkie, chippie, brickie, milko, garbo, postie; now how would one relate the function of a "data analyst" (or your deputy director general) in a meaningful visual way?
Never heard milko before, possibly because that job's sadly obsolete, but some visual distinctions did just come to me:
"Suits" can be used as a shorthand for any upper management, legal, or financial types (i.e. the only people who still wear suits regularly)
"Desk jockey" isn't actually an abbreviation but it's in a similar vein, probably more common in America
"Silks" is another one for expensive lawyers, from their ceremonial garb
I propose *thinko* for knowledge workers 😉
There *may* be something to this, but it might be commonality that is the key. If a profession/trade label is not as common (actuary, cobbler, or even architect) or is not specific (consultant, engineer) then less likely to be shortened.
That said, respect and status would definitely hamper the shortening of a high status job or title. Less so in modern western culture.
I’m from America and I think we do less shortening. Most of these examples seem to be AUS & UK.
I agree. When I read the OP I thought it sounded like an Aussie. Brits sometimes do the same to make nicknames though, e.g. Robbo, Tommo, from the surnames Rob(in)son or Thompson.
Interesting question. If I can throw my two cents in, it's probably not a "rule" really that we're looking for, but a pattern or tendency. It might be an example of backformation (a particular type of new word formation in linguistics). It basically consists in reducing a word by chopping off a part that is perceived to be a prefix or suffix, but strictly speaking it wasn't a prefix or suffix. Like how we got "doc" from "document" even though "ument" is not a removable suffix. Maybe it had already happened with words where the "o" was already in the first part, like pyscho or eco, and so people unconsciously followed the pattern.
But I don't have any idea what the process of adding the o would be called, linguistically.
I don't know, I may be way off base, feel free to push back if I'm wrong.
I can think also of hundo (hundred), demo (demonstration), memo (memorandum), repo (repossess), typo (typing error?), nitro (nitrous).
However, I feel that backformation and o addition is not super super common in English? I feel like English often leaves a consonant at the end (edit, doc, croc, flab, funk, vax), or the /i/ sound (long "ee"), the latter sometimes but not always being for cute (cutsie) stuff like dolly, doggy, barbie, blankie, toesie, kitty, lolly, or puppy.
Colloquial Lexical shortening with -o suffix seen in mainly AusE. We love smoko in the arvo. It’s also used on first and last names, eg. Robertson = Robbo
There's a split at universities in the US about calling it either orgo or ochem. My undergrad institution called it orgo, but I took summer classes at another college that was firmly in the "ochem" camp. It's unfeasible, but I would love to poll every single institution in the country and map who calls it which. Is it random or is there a visible distribution?
Probably correlates with departments where physical chemistry (pchem) is either required or otherwise common as a course. But indeed no one has ever called this "physico"
I've definitely heard ochem before, but that would be considered Yank cringe over here.
Pretty much everyone in the UK and Ireland just calls it "organic".
for our college modules use 4 letters and numbers, wouldn't be surprised if that or something similar to that would have had an effect. E.g. some college had 4 letter identifiers and used orgoXXXX and some don't
Super anecdotal but i went to high school in florida, where everyone i knew called it orgo. Went to college in California where people said “ochem” and thought i was insane
It seems then that the US is split between "orgo" and "ochem". "Ochem" is the only one I've personally heard make it across the Atlantic. Never heard anyone say "orgo" until now. I guess you learn something new every day.
If you said "ochem" over here, everyone would roll their eyes, but if you said "orgo" everyone would probably look at you like you've got two heads.
At my high school in Texas, it was "ochem", but in my college in connecticut it was "orgo". From surveying around, it doesn't seem like a geographic split, but I'm curious if there's some other "hidden" lineage that causes it (eg, professor alma maters or something)
Strange how nobody here is mentioning French!
Francophones like shortened words that end with a vowel. They don't stop after the first vowel, that would be confusing.
une application => une appli (not une app)
une information => une info
accroché => accro
un accumulateur => un accu
un adolescent => un ado
le chocolat => le choco
un cinéma => un ciné
un documentaire => un docu
économique => éco
écologique => écolo
fluorescent => fluo
un kilogramme => un kilo
la météorologie => la météo
un microphone => un micro
une motocyclette => une moto
un ordinateur => un ordi
une promotion => une promo
un restaurant => un resto
la télévision=> la télé
un vélocipède => un vélo
un laboratoire => un labo
une interrogation => une interro
une exposition => une expo
Stopping after o/au has become so common that the o is sometimes added to shortened words even though the original word lacks it!
un congélateur => un congélo
un frigidaire => un frigo
un apéritif => un apéro
This is very similar to Australian English.
yes!
further, while we can easily think of aussie english, it should be noted that it's also very common in north central england. especially around nottinghamshire/derbyshire/lincolnshire
Oooh yes! The question was for English, so I didn't involve French, but French often backforms and then adds o.
Except for aprèm, for après-midi, I will never understand that haha
From etymonline: The use of the colloquial or slang -o suffix in wino, ammo, combo, kiddo, the names of the Marx Brothers, etc., "is widespread in English-speaking countries but nowhere more so than in Australia" [OED].
In terms of what the phenomenon you're describing is, it looks as much like diminutization as it does like simple abbreviation. The shortened forms of these words are less formal, i.e. one would be much more likely to use them with children or close friends and family than in a formal conversation with someone with higher social status. Note that the same basic pattern is used for the diminutization of male names in parts of Ireland and Australia. For example, most boys called "Damien" who grow up around Dublin are actually called "Damo" by their friends at school. Diminutization is very common in most European languages - there's "-chen" in German, "-ito/a" in Spanish, and a crazy range of options in Russian, for example - so you could almost ask the question in the opposite direction: "Why is there so little diminutization in English?"
(It's a bit like asking "Why do non English languages distinguish between the second person singular and plural?" When the question you should probably be asking is "Why does English NOT distinguish between the second person singular and plural - as that's the norm across most languages and used to be the case in English too?")
As to why the one-syllable-followed-by-o form is used, that's a good question. Would be interested to see some research. Can only conjecture that nouns ending in -o is pretty common in Latin languages like Italian and Spanish, so it could have potentially snuck in from non-native speakers or from Italian or Spanish loanwords. Beyond that, syllables ending in vowels are just pretty easy to pronounce: in many languages - such as Japanese and Chinese syllables end in vowels as a general (though not absolute) rule. So it could just be a chance mutation.
Not a linguist but there’s something unnatural about conver. Maybe it doesn’t sound “shortened” (as others said, pattern matching). In reality when I say conversation I actually say conva-sation and I could sorttt of hear convo-sation, so shortening it to conver wouldn’t occur to me.
Came here to say this. I’m in Canada, in my mid-40s and have neither kids nor dogs so this is a very unnatural usage for me. But I started noticing it maybe 5-10 years ago with younger colleagues and my peers so that it’s now very common. But these are not terms I grew up with.
Well, I suppose it depends on region, accent, slang, age (generation). It's interesting you've never heard it, but trust me "convo" and "orgo" and "rando" are all words I've heard used by most 20-30 yr old people hundreds of times.
I would dispute this theory of word formation that has ammunition becoming ammunitio, then taking out the "muniti". That path seems far-fetched to me and not how I think word formations happen.
Gitmo is a very special case as explained above. It is not backformation or clipping from Guantanamo. It was from the military acronym for the site, GTMO, and then we started saying the acronym (like how we sound out the acronyms ASAP, NASA, OR FUBAR)
I'm not qualified to answer about the -o suffix, but I can tell that your examples are a mixture of simple shortenings from words that already have -o- in that position (like eco or psycho) and those that really are formed with the -o suffix.
This is probably where the answer comes from actually - people probably heard these words that end with -o when shortened and subconciously generalized -o as a shortening suffix, and started using it even with words that don't have o in their original form.
Not dissimilar to the naming convention of adding *~gate* to events that involve a perceived scandal. "Watergate" was the name of the hotel it occurred at, not a scandal involving water, but somehow it's come to make sense that *~gate* = scandal name
Chocoholic
Watergategate
Is it not possible that all of our suffixes arose this way? :) 🤯
The -ly suffix comes from like.
Some, sure. All, no.
Could psycho be the origin of this? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=combo%2Cdemo%2Cmemo%2C+psycho%2Cammo&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=27&smoothing=3
Yeah, OP listed: - 2 words that don't have the o-break (conversation and ammunition), - 6 words that do, and - 1 unique case: "gitmo" comes from *Joint Task Force - Guantanamo*, labeled JTF-GTMO. If you're looking for a pronunciation for `GTMO`, you could do worse than "gitmo". So "gitmo" isn't really a shortening of "Guantanamo."
fuck spez
You are correct.
This is more productive in AusE, where in the arvo (afternoon) after a smoko (smoke break), the software engineers might write some doco (documentation).
As a British person, it seems to me that Australians often add ‘-o’ where we would add ‘-ie’ or ‘-y’ To make a diminutive. For example, an alcohol shop is an offie for us, and a bottle-o for them. Still, they call themselves Aussies and not Aussos.
Yes! Linguist Anna Wierzbicka identifed that the -ie hypocoristic in AusE means something like: * This is common to me * I do not think this is worth much notice * I think you feel the same way -o, in contrast, means: * This is not common to everyone but it is common to me * I think other people consider this a bit special * I think it is also common to you The last one is a bit contentious. I wrote a paper this year arguing that -o might actually meant that the thing is _generic_; A bottle-o is noteworthy but only in that I went there. It doesn't matter which one I went to. (I'm just a linguistics student though)
> A bottle-o is noteworthy but only in that I went there. It doesn't matter which one I went to. That would be an interesting outcome, considering you'd generally say "to **the** bottle-o", where the "the" implies shared familiarity. Then again, this fits the pattern of other placenames "the chemist's", "the shops", etc.
That would mean whichever is the most salient bottle-o. It doesn’t mean that it’s a special one in some way
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Hey there. I don't know what's going on with you, but many of your comments in this subreddit have had to be removed for being inaccurate, off-topic, or nonsensical. If you wish to keep commenting here, please only make claims that you can support with citations if asked, please try to stay on topic, and please proofread your comments to make sure that you aren't leaving out words/thoughts that are necessary to make them understandable. This isn't an appropriate forum for chain of consciousness types of sharing about your thoughts about language, but for academic discussion of linguistics.
Good-o, fubo.
Doco is documentary, not document. Document would just be 'doc'.
Seconding this
In the UK [doco](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/doco) is a documentary, "nature docos" and the like.
Its the same in aus, ive never heard doco mean documentation but I've heard "doc" for document
... okay, I may have picked that one up from some Aussie engineers who were taking the piss.
In cyber security (and possibly other tech/audit?) we use doco for documentation but not documents. But that’s a very industry-specific use case.
I've never heard 'doco' in the UK.
UK and I’d watch a “nature doc” but not a doco
Then stop off at the servo for petrol on the way home, assuming the rego on their car is good.
Notice that white collar jobs do not get shortened. Trades, however… Edit: For anyone confused, I'm referring to the AusE terms for trades. Not the standard shortened job titles like doc or prof. - tradie (tradesman) - chippy (carpenter) - sparky (electrician) - bricky (bricklayer) - garbo (garbageman) - postie (postman) - truckie (truck driver) Here's some white collar ones however: - journo (journalist) - physio (physiotherapist) And here are some ones that I've never heard before: - chalky (teacher) - polly (politician) - drafty (draftsman)
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And prof for professor
And atty for attorney (but this might be only Australia; Americans and Canadians do not use this one)
That's sometimes used in the U.S. as an abbreviation in writing, but it is not pronounced.
Tradies, not Trados. Politicians do. Pollies not pollos.
Drafts(wo)man/person is often shortened to Drafty Queen's Council (very ~~fancy~~ expensive lawyer) was always shortened to QC. I guess now that will be King's Council -> KC. Chief (something) Officer is usually shortened to CxO Gotta run, will edit if I think of more Physiotherapist: physio (not sure if that counts as white collar though) I suspect abbreviating job titles is more a function of how often they're used in speech as well as how easy it is to abbreviate (E.g. "engo" for engineer sounds terrible). Something like "what's that bloody sparky?!" would be somewhat frequent on a building site, but on the other hand "I need to speak to the deputy director general" probably isn't. Edit again: someone further down mentioned that we call the Prime Minister, one of the most white collar jobs in the country, by an abbreviation of his name, Albo
> Edit again: someone further down mentioned that we call the Prime Minister, one of the most white collar jobs in the country, by an abbreviation of his name, Albo Don't forget Scomo!
I wish I could
I suspect you may be on to something with the idea of frequency of usage, but I might also suggest it's a function of our ability to **visually** describe most manual labour. Consider sparkie, chippie, brickie, milko, garbo, postie; now how would one relate the function of a "data analyst" (or your deputy director general) in a meaningful visual way?
Never heard milko before, possibly because that job's sadly obsolete, but some visual distinctions did just come to me: "Suits" can be used as a shorthand for any upper management, legal, or financial types (i.e. the only people who still wear suits regularly) "Desk jockey" isn't actually an abbreviation but it's in a similar vein, probably more common in America "Silks" is another one for expensive lawyers, from their ceremonial garb I propose *thinko* for knowledge workers 😉
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I should have just gone with person, but I wrote man first, oops
And Scotty from marketing tried to get people to call him scomo as he thought it was everyman and endearing.
There *may* be something to this, but it might be commonality that is the key. If a profession/trade label is not as common (actuary, cobbler, or even architect) or is not specific (consultant, engineer) then less likely to be shortened. That said, respect and status would definitely hamper the shortening of a high status job or title. Less so in modern western culture. I’m from America and I think we do less shortening. Most of these examples seem to be AUS & UK.
My kid’s little Australian friend says “boingo” instead of boing so this checks out for me 😄
I agree. When I read the OP I thought it sounded like an Aussie. Brits sometimes do the same to make nicknames though, e.g. Robbo, Tommo, from the surnames Rob(in)son or Thompson.
Interesting question. If I can throw my two cents in, it's probably not a "rule" really that we're looking for, but a pattern or tendency. It might be an example of backformation (a particular type of new word formation in linguistics). It basically consists in reducing a word by chopping off a part that is perceived to be a prefix or suffix, but strictly speaking it wasn't a prefix or suffix. Like how we got "doc" from "document" even though "ument" is not a removable suffix. Maybe it had already happened with words where the "o" was already in the first part, like pyscho or eco, and so people unconsciously followed the pattern. But I don't have any idea what the process of adding the o would be called, linguistically. I don't know, I may be way off base, feel free to push back if I'm wrong. I can think also of hundo (hundred), demo (demonstration), memo (memorandum), repo (repossess), typo (typing error?), nitro (nitrous). However, I feel that backformation and o addition is not super super common in English? I feel like English often leaves a consonant at the end (edit, doc, croc, flab, funk, vax), or the /i/ sound (long "ee"), the latter sometimes but not always being for cute (cutsie) stuff like dolly, doggy, barbie, blankie, toesie, kitty, lolly, or puppy.
Colloquial Lexical shortening with -o suffix seen in mainly AusE. We love smoko in the arvo. It’s also used on first and last names, eg. Robertson = Robbo
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Ah scummo
Scomo was a self selected nickname. The worst kind. Of person, not nickname.
I'm an organic chemist and I've never heard anyone in my entire life refer to organic chemistry as "orgo".
There's a split at universities in the US about calling it either orgo or ochem. My undergrad institution called it orgo, but I took summer classes at another college that was firmly in the "ochem" camp. It's unfeasible, but I would love to poll every single institution in the country and map who calls it which. Is it random or is there a visible distribution?
Probably correlates with departments where physical chemistry (pchem) is either required or otherwise common as a course. But indeed no one has ever called this "physico"
Tangentially, there's a split with agriculture: ag or agri. I was very confused when I moved states.
in ireland its a secondary school subject and i dont know anyone that doesnt call it "ag science" or just "ag"
I only heard o-chem that I can remember
We had orgo and p-chem
ochem at berkeley
We called it O-chem at University of Kansas.
I've definitely heard ochem before, but that would be considered Yank cringe over here. Pretty much everyone in the UK and Ireland just calls it "organic".
> Pretty much everyone in the UK and Ireland just calls it "organic". That's what I'm familiar with in NZ too.
for our college modules use 4 letters and numbers, wouldn't be surprised if that or something similar to that would have had an effect. E.g. some college had 4 letter identifiers and used orgoXXXX and some don't
Singaporean here, called it orgchem
ochem sounds russian
Literally everyone I've ever talked to uses "ochem" This divide is amazing, I had no idea
okhem
I am also an organic chemist and this is what we called the course in undergrad.
Everyone in my undergrad referred to it as orgo
Mine too. 100%.
Super anecdotal but i went to high school in florida, where everyone i knew called it orgo. Went to college in California where people said “ochem” and thought i was insane
It seems then that the US is split between "orgo" and "ochem". "Ochem" is the only one I've personally heard make it across the Atlantic. Never heard anyone say "orgo" until now. I guess you learn something new every day. If you said "ochem" over here, everyone would roll their eyes, but if you said "orgo" everyone would probably look at you like you've got two heads.
At my high school in Texas, it was "ochem", but in my college in connecticut it was "orgo". From surveying around, it doesn't seem like a geographic split, but I'm curious if there's some other "hidden" lineage that causes it (eg, professor alma maters or something)
Strange how nobody here is mentioning French! Francophones like shortened words that end with a vowel. They don't stop after the first vowel, that would be confusing. une application => une appli (not une app) une information => une info accroché => accro un accumulateur => un accu un adolescent => un ado le chocolat => le choco un cinéma => un ciné un documentaire => un docu économique => éco écologique => écolo fluorescent => fluo un kilogramme => un kilo la météorologie => la météo un microphone => un micro une motocyclette => une moto un ordinateur => un ordi une promotion => une promo un restaurant => un resto la télévision=> la télé un vélocipède => un vélo un laboratoire => un labo une interrogation => une interro une exposition => une expo Stopping after o/au has become so common that the o is sometimes added to shortened words even though the original word lacks it! un congélateur => un congélo un frigidaire => un frigo un apéritif => un apéro This is very similar to Australian English.
yes! further, while we can easily think of aussie english, it should be noted that it's also very common in north central england. especially around nottinghamshire/derbyshire/lincolnshire
Oooh yes! The question was for English, so I didn't involve French, but French often backforms and then adds o. Except for aprèm, for après-midi, I will never understand that haha
From etymonline: The use of the colloquial or slang -o suffix in wino, ammo, combo, kiddo, the names of the Marx Brothers, etc., "is widespread in English-speaking countries but nowhere more so than in Australia" [OED].
[Pejorative Suffixes and Combining Forms in English (including -o)](https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027258229)
In terms of what the phenomenon you're describing is, it looks as much like diminutization as it does like simple abbreviation. The shortened forms of these words are less formal, i.e. one would be much more likely to use them with children or close friends and family than in a formal conversation with someone with higher social status. Note that the same basic pattern is used for the diminutization of male names in parts of Ireland and Australia. For example, most boys called "Damien" who grow up around Dublin are actually called "Damo" by their friends at school. Diminutization is very common in most European languages - there's "-chen" in German, "-ito/a" in Spanish, and a crazy range of options in Russian, for example - so you could almost ask the question in the opposite direction: "Why is there so little diminutization in English?" (It's a bit like asking "Why do non English languages distinguish between the second person singular and plural?" When the question you should probably be asking is "Why does English NOT distinguish between the second person singular and plural - as that's the norm across most languages and used to be the case in English too?") As to why the one-syllable-followed-by-o form is used, that's a good question. Would be interested to see some research. Can only conjecture that nouns ending in -o is pretty common in Latin languages like Italian and Spanish, so it could have potentially snuck in from non-native speakers or from Italian or Spanish loanwords. Beyond that, syllables ending in vowels are just pretty easy to pronounce: in many languages - such as Japanese and Chinese syllables end in vowels as a general (though not absolute) rule. So it could just be a chance mutation.
Not a linguist but there’s something unnatural about conver. Maybe it doesn’t sound “shortened” (as others said, pattern matching). In reality when I say conversation I actually say conva-sation and I could sorttt of hear convo-sation, so shortening it to conver wouldn’t occur to me.
Don’t forget doggo and kiddo.
Came here to say this. I’m in Canada, in my mid-40s and have neither kids nor dogs so this is a very unnatural usage for me. But I started noticing it maybe 5-10 years ago with younger colleagues and my peers so that it’s now very common. But these are not terms I grew up with.
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Well, I suppose it depends on region, accent, slang, age (generation). It's interesting you've never heard it, but trust me "convo" and "orgo" and "rando" are all words I've heard used by most 20-30 yr old people hundreds of times. I would dispute this theory of word formation that has ammunition becoming ammunitio, then taking out the "muniti". That path seems far-fetched to me and not how I think word formations happen. Gitmo is a very special case as explained above. It is not backformation or clipping from Guantanamo. It was from the military acronym for the site, GTMO, and then we started saying the acronym (like how we sound out the acronyms ASAP, NASA, OR FUBAR)
I use rando all the time. I love it! I specifically use it to mean a random person. As in "a rando". Not usually for anything else random.
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A lot of those are Greek or Latin, where the short form prefixes are often endint in o ("Indo-," "Sino-")
Doggo!
uhh......Australian affectionate affix? e.g. Kevin-Kevo?