Today’s new-to-me word isn’t all that useful, but it amused me, and there are a few interesting things to note about it. The word is unicornaire, which I got from a recent tweet:
Let’s unpack unicornaire. First, as you might know, in the world of business a unicorn is a privately held startup company that achieves a valuation of a billion dollars. This is not an easy feat; in fact, companies that do it are as rare as unicorns. Obviously, the metaphor doesn’t entirely work (the number of actual unicorns is zero, right?), but it took hold anyway.
The billion-dollar milestone is a kind of shorthand for the private investors who funded a company like this because it represents a good “exit”—a point at which the investor has a good enough return to cash out. Many investments in startups don’t pan out, so an investment in a unicorn company funds other gambles, much like Hollywood hits fund the making of less successful movies.
Now -aire. This is the same ending that we see on millionaire. This ending came from French as a variant of what we also see in the ending -ary, meaning “thing connected with.” Words with this ending include aviary, dictionary, and sanctuary. A millionaire is someone who’s associated with a million [units of a thing].
There aren’t a lot of words that use -aire as it’s used in millionaire. The words billionaire and trillionaire and zillionaire copy the pattern, suggesting that it’s [quantity]+aire. There’s a connotation in these terms that the quantity has to be large. This becomes clear when people use the word thousandaire—although it follows the pattern, it goes against the connotation. (Though thousandaire is also now used in discussions about modest but important financial goals, so I might be misreading irony there.)
Anyway, in the tweet Stacie Frederick used the combination unicorn and (million)aire as unicornaire. It doesn’t exactly follow the [quantity]+aire pattern, but we can deduce it to mean like “someone who gets fabulously wealthy by starting a unicorn-type company.” It’s a slick coinage. I’m also now wondering whether we have other words that follow the pattern of [agency]+aire. An investigation for another time.
Origins. The other day Ellen Jovin said “I am perplexed” on Twitter. This got me mildly interested in where perplexed came from. It felt sort of clear, but not, if you know what I mean.
Obviously, it’s per plus plex. The per prefix has many meanings; I think that for this word, it represents “through, by means of.” The plex part is also in words like complex, meaning “braided, folded, twisted, tangled.” So to be perplexed is to be bewildered due to entwining and whatnot. I was pleased to learn that the plex part shows up somewhat clearly in plaited and pliable and less obviously in words like duplicate and implicit.
An interesting trivium about perplexed is that it started in English as the adjective perplex, going back to the 1400s. (“Þe popis lawe..makiþ hem perplex”) It evolved into perplexed, and only later did this participle-looking version engender the verb to perplex. There’s probably a truth to be universally acknowledged that a word in possession of an -ed ending really wants to be a verb. At least, that’s what seems to have happened here.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.