Robot wars

When -bot words do turn unfriendly, they emphasize the knee-jerk automaticity of what’s being done, and so are often political. There are Obamabots and Randbots; Romneybots, Republibots, and Dembots, Conserva-bots, Bushbots, Palinbots, Paulbots (Ron Paul enthusiasts), and Limbots (followers of Rush Limbaugh).

The scariest -bot may be the fembot, encompassing the evil-but-hot fembots of Austin Powers, ads for Svedka Vodka, and the Robyn song that insists that “fembots have feelings too.” Why don’t we call them robo-femmes? Because they’re still more sexy than scary: thus the -bot suffix.

So what happened to make robo- take the aggressive path and -bot the cute and friendly one? Other words that have split into prefix-suffix pairs have clearer rationales for their separate meanings: Alcoholic’s more common -holic suffix is used for any addiction, with alco- reserved for things related to alcohol, such as alcopops (alcoholic drinks that taste like soft drinks) and alcolocks (devices that disable a car’s ignition if the driver has had too much to drink). More commonly, though, it’s only the less-specific tail end of a word that goes on to a productive life as a suffix: the -thon of marathon, the -naut of astronaut, the -gate of Watergate.

Perhaps it’s because robot’s two syllables are equally meaningful (or meaningless) that we can get two different affixes out of it: -bot, as a suffix, acts more like a cute diminutive, like -let or -ling, while robo-, as a prefix, behaves more like a menacing intensifier, like mega- and uber-. Either way, at this point, the divergence looks as if it’s here to stay - and is almost, dare we say, automatic.

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com . E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com.