Learn English – -iola as suffix

suffixes

My buddy says things like cashiola instead of cash and calls my Mikeyola instead of Mikey. We are both native American English speakers, and my buddy swears other people say this.

Is this precendented in common English, or is he just making this up?

We have done some googling and we can’t find any words that seem to have this suffix in blogs or anything. Cashiola seems to be a name.

Best Answer

Etymonline's entry for pianola suggests:

ca. 1896, trademark name (1901) of a player piano, the ending perhaps abstracted from viola (q.v.) and meant as a diminutive suffix.The pianola's popularity led to a rash of product names ending in -ola, especially Victrola (q.v.), and slang words such as payola.

That is, using an -ola suffix as a diminutive is not unprecedented, and is something that people have done for more than a century.

An anomalous example is granola, which etymonline notes was used capitalized in the years after 1886 for a kind of breakfast cereal, and has been used uncapitalized since about 1970. 1886 is ten years before the 1896-1901 timeframe mentioned earlier for popularization of the -ola suffix.

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