Please pass the ketchup, I think I'll go to bed

In a recent press release to explain the latest we're-sure-it-won't-actually-be-good show to appear on Cartoon Network, one of the Cartoon Network executives said the animation style was ``more animation-y, more out there.'' This new nearly word has drawn derisive sneers from at least some of the animation buffs who've heard it, for fair reasons. Probably the best reason is that the actual adjective ``cartoony'' would seem to fit what he probably means, and using ``cartoony'' instead has the benefit of not sounding as if he were trying to explain just what would change once Poochy was added to the show.

And yet ... I find I don't hate the word, exactly. I don't like it that much, since it doesn't seem to flow quite right. But I could accept the idea that one might want to distinguish between something being cartoony -- which despite the attempt of Adult Swim to make ``cartoon'' synonymous with ``loud and unpleasant'', and the efforts of dozens of networks and studios for decades before that to make it another word for ``shoddily written and only reluctantly moving'', still has the implication of an absurd and ideally unpredictable but funny worldview and the things being drawn being strongly animated, showing signs of life and motion. Case in point, your average early Fleischer cartoon includes plenty of motion even if nothing is going on; it's animated even when it's just a character reading a sign very slowly. That is more animated than an equivalent scene with a modern character, even if the sign is more inherently funny or loopy. And, besides that, you can use ``animated'' without referring to cartoons, or else the phrase ``animated cartoon'' would come under attack for being the sort of harmless redundancy that occasionally gets grammar fanboys worked up about harmless phrases like ``ATM machine'' or ``tuna fish''.

Still, while I can rationalize a reason for saying something like ``animated-y'' on purpose, I don't really like it either. Generally I like attempted new words that allow for more gradations in meaning, but whether a word sounds right isn't really susceptible to logic. For example, even though I admit it's an appropriate use of the verb I can't stand the phrase ``grow your business'' even when it is in the context of getting your business to grow.

I'm not sure what point I'm getting to, except that I've come across an attempted word that I think is justified in being given a try in the language, even though I doubt it's actually meant in the context in which it was used, and I don't think I'll find any use for it myself. It's a strange little phenomenon. I stand by my rejection of ``virtuosities'' as a more complicated word for ``virtues'', however.

Trivia: Though the character debuted on radio in 1930, sponsor Blue Coal kept The Shadow from being a character -- as opposed to narrator -- until the 26 September 1937 The Shadow. Source: On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, John Dunning.

Currently Reading: The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, Alan Trachtenberg.