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Happy Falloween: It's not quite Halloween yet, but it's not too early and it's never too late to get into the spirit of the holiday. In the current issue of Time, Michael Elliott's essay, Boo, Humbug! laments that:
Americans will spend about $6.9 billion on Halloween this year, $2 billion on candy alone, an extra $1.5 billion on costumes and much of the rest on decorations and doodads. Don't get me started on outfits for pets or the move to extend the holiday into an event that runs for a whole season so that it becomes you'll love this -- "Falloween."
But, it's not just the cultural anthropologists who might cringe with the commercialization of this hallowed feast into the shopping season of Falloween.

In Word Spy, cultural etymologist Paul McFedries explains the origins of this new word:
This term unites the words fall and Halloween to recognize the lengths to which many people now go to celebrate the latter. (I think most people know the origin of Halloween. Just in case, it was originally Hallow-e'en or Hallowe'en, a contraction of All-Hallow-Even, the night before All Hallows Day "now All Saints Day" which is November 1.) If you saw houses bedecked with pumpkins and skulls and cobwebs a couple of weeks ago, then you know those people are fully immersed in the Falloween thing.
While shopkeepers rejoice in this new shopping season, prescriptivist lexicographers like Robert Hartwell Fiske, the editor and publisher of The Vocabula Review, decry such descriptivist's language creeping into official English dictionaries.

But, even stranger words have been created in the Wordlab.
I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my monster from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise
A visitor from Bucharest, Romania, Europe asked us to create a Halloween & Party Costume Store & Brand Name. "Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?"
Posted by abnu on Thursday, October 30, 2003 @ 6:45 AM [ + ]

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