A comment on the vulgar noun crapola in yesterday’s posting “A portmantriple”, from David Preston:
[cited by AZ] “-ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.”
Wasn’t the original ‘ola’ the shoe-polish brand Shinola? Then it became humorous with the phrase “know shit from Shinola.”
Actually, playful -ola didn’t start with Shinola, though Shinola appeared fairly early in the history.
From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on 9/23/08, about -ola:, which lists [a] diminutives; [b] trade names; [c] humorous or dismissive formations:
[a] A few words in this ending come directly from Latin, usually with a diminutive sense: areola (Latin, diminutive of area, area), a small circular area, in particular the ring of pigmented skin surrounding a nipple; cupola (Latin cupula, small cask or burying vault, diminutive of cupa, cask), a rounded dome forming or adorning a roof or ceiling; pergola (Latin pergula, projecting roof, from pergere, come or go forward), an archway in a garden or park.
[b] This diminutive sense may have been the inspiration for various US trade names (Pianola, a mechanical piano [late 19th c.]; Victrola, a type of phonograph [ca. 1900]; Moviola [ca. 1925], a type of film editing machine; Granola [late 19th c.], a kind of breakfast cereal), mostly now generic or obsolete. [Crayola crayons from 1903. Shinola shoe polish: name trademarked 1903, company founded 1907; went out of business in 1960.]
[c] From the 1920s in the US the ending began to be added to a variety of nouns and adjectives to make humorous slang terms. Many of these were only temporary, but two of several that have survived are boffola (from slang boff, a hearty laugh), a joke or a line in a script meant to get a laugh, and crapola (from crap, excrement), total rubbish. One that has become standard English is payola, the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product, from which have evolved drugola, payola in the form of drugs, and plugola, payment to get favourable mention or display (a plug) for a product in a film or on radio or television. The ending is mainly limited to the US.
And then the idiom (not) know shit from Shinola ‘be completely ignorant’, of WWII vintage — which has been subject to scientific investigation. From the Neatorama site on 2/11/14, “Spectroscopic Discrimination of Shit from Shinola”, quoting an article from The Annals of Improbable Research by Thomas H. Painter, Michael E. Schaepman, Wolf Schweizer, and Jason Brazile. With the conclusion:
… it is evident that to the human eye, shit and Shinola are inseparable given similar morphology [‘form’]`, whereas with near-infrared spectroscopy shit is easily known from Shinola.
