Joel Neff

Spin has compiled The 40 Best Albums From the Last 40 Years That You Probably Didn’t Hear (But Should Have) and it’s a hell of a read. I’ve bookmarked, downloaded, or otherwise made note of a half dozen records I’ll be checking out. But. What really struck me was this use of the word playlist in the description of Linda Ronstadt/Ann Savoy’s 2006 release Adieu False Heart:

“Fans of Ronstadt can playlist the five on which she sings lead as a Stone Poneys EP”

Here, author Arsenio Orteza uses playlist as a verb. Which is absolutely cromulent and, in this case, incredibly apt. That said, I wanted to dig into it just a little because playlist fascinates me. See, the thing is, I have this weird idea that ~list is in the slow, uncertain, and possibly illusory process of shifting from just a transparent compound element towards something that functions more like an affix. The evidence for this is scant and subject to interpretation (or over-interpretation as the case may be), so mainly I’m just noting this verb usage as a data point.

So, just for record keeping - at the moment, Merriam-Webster doesn’t include a verb usage in their definition of playlist, nor does Cambridge. The OED does mention a verb listing but I don’t have access to its full definition, so I’m turning to the Collins Online Dictionary which has this as their example of playlist as verb:

“If a song, album, or artist is playlisted, it is put on a radio station’s playlist.”

The difference here is that the dictionary’s example uses playlist passively while the Spin piece uses it as an active verb. What this makes me curious about, is whether this active use of playlist supports the idea mentioned above, that ~list is sometimes functioning more like a suffix rather than a simple compound. Of course, that means a research question is needed. In this case, I think the most apropos question would be whether, playlist, as an active verb, has generalized beyond literally adding songs to an actual list.

Or, to put it another way, can I use playlist for things other than music? Would people raise an eyebrow if I said I want to playlist this movie? That would make it somewhat synonymous with watchlist, itself a ~list word that could probably be used as an active verb without anyone questioning it. But what about playlisting an author? Still cromulent? No idea.

On another day, when I have a bit more free time, I’ll go digging into the corpora to see if I can find more verb usages, either active or passive, and see if they can be built into a research project that will give me evidence for or against my pet hypothesis. In the meantime, the Spin piece is well worth reading and you may find an album or two that you do, in fact, wish to playlist.

Keywords: playlist, ~list, suffixes, compounds

Driving home, I saw a group of bats above the rice fields, swooping, diving, and generally munching down on all the tasty mosquitoes. But it occurred to me, I have no idea what the collective noun for bats is. The Macquarie Dictionary says it’s a colony; James Lipton, in his incredible compendium, An Exaltation of Larks, cites a natural history book and calls them a cloud. But from what I saw this evening, from the perspective of just another mosquito looking for a place to land, the only phrase that comes to mind is a terror.

File under: wordology