“Parts of the city might be under-retailed, though I don’t think any part of the city is under-Dunkin’ Donuted.”
--Jonanthan Bowles, Center for an Urban Future,
“Under-Dunkin’ Donuted”?
The quote came from the free daily newspaper, Metro, in a recent article about the number of chain restaurants in New York City. I don’t think that the speaker, Jonathan Bowles, intended to coin any particularly new usage with his unique “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” – it was probably just the most efficient way for him to say that although some areas of the city might not have enough stores in general, nowhere is there a lack of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Now I know we American English speakers have taken certain brand names and turned them in nouns – like Kleenex , Band-aid, Post-it. And some of those brand names nouns are also verbs (scotch tape, Xerox, Wite-Out). Other languages have turned brand names into general nouns: Spanish, with Bic (for “pen”); French with Gillette (as “razors.”)
But I don’t know another language where you can take the name of a store, restaurant, or in this case, an international chain retailer that sells 35 varieties of donuts and other calorie-laden goodies, and turn it into a participle.
A participle is that verb form that ends in either “ing” (informing) or “ed” (informed) or some irregular ending (written, sold, brought, etc); it can act as a verb (I am informing; I have informed) or an adjective (I am informed). Participles are amazingly useful in everyday speech.
Participles that end in “ing” are present participles; they’re present because they show some action in progress (either now or in the past): I am working; I was working; I have been working, etc. Past participles are ones that go with helping verbs like “have” and “had”: I have written; you had worked. And it is this past participle form that is also used as an adjective – and the one that has become the most flexible:
When I moved to New York in the 1980’s a friend commented that people in Manhattan were totally “yupped” out, meaning that everyone looked very yuppy (do you remember the word created from “young urban professionals”?) in their work clothes – especially women in their shoulder-padded blazers and floppy ties.
Did you catch the word “shoulder-padded” just now? That is a participle, which, like under-Dunkin’ Donuted, you will not find in the dictionary, but which requires no explanation to understand that it means, blazers with shoulder pads. If I had said “… women in their blazers with shoulder pads and floppy ties” it would have sounded like the blazers had floppy ties. And if I had written “women in their floppy ties and blazers with shoulder pads,” it would have been clearer, but clumsy. Shoulder-padded is the way to go – and unofficial though the word may be, English does not need any grammatical permission to make those kinds of switcheroos. The structure of our language is set up to handle that kind of thing.
In German, there is a fanciful term for “jack of all trades” that translates as “the egg-laying, wool-and-milk pig” or eierlegende wollmilchsau (Iyer-LAY-guehn-duh-vole-milsh-zow). In a Latin language such a concept would have to be written out as “a pig that lays eggs and produces wool and milk” – which loses much in the translation. English can clearly handle the idea; we just happen not to have that particular expression in our book. But the fact that we can stack our participles-as-adjectives and turn nouns (wool, milk) into adjectives to describe a type of versatile pig shows the essence of our language’s West Germanic foundation—and the basis for its flexibility.
Such verbal elasticity shows up with Google, a trademark term (noun, and one derived from “googol,” a mathematical term) that is scarcely as old as a fifth grader, but which is now noted in the dictionary in lower case as a verb: I google, I googled, I have googled. And though it is not yet listed as an adjective, it certainly is used that way -- as in, “a much-googled site.” (I just googled “googled site” and there were over 2 million usages, though some of them were the past tense of google, and not the participle.)
Starbucks, that popular purveyor of caffeinated beverages, is not in the dictionary yet, nor has it even become an unofficial common noun or verb, despite its ubiquity. Still, as a participle, it clearly works: if you said that your neighborhood was totally over-Starbucked (or in lower case, starbucked), you would know just how easy it is to get a double soy latte where you live. In fact, there are over 30,000 Google usages listed for “Starbucked.”
But so far, "under-Dunkin' Donuted" has only a single reference on Google – the one in the August 1, 2008 New York Metro. It’s such a specific adjective that I can’t imagine much room for its growth, except maybe as another part of speech. As a noun, it might be used like, “The under-Dunkin’ Donutedness of the neighborhood ...” As a verb, it could go: “Homeowners have intentionally under-Dunkin’ Donuted the neighborhood.” Have fun with it!
However, perhaps we’ll start to see more chain retailers turn into participial adjectives – like, over-jamba juiced or thoroughly chipotleed (2 “e’s” for the final “e” sound). But “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” has a certain special sound: maybe it’s the recurring, alliterative “d” in its four out of seven syllables, and the way you have to say each syllable clearly — there’s no way you can rush that phrase, yet. Plus it’s a lot funnier-sounding than say, “Mac Attack” (a noun meaning a sudden craving for a MacDonald’s Big Mac hamburger).
It’s simply hard not to appreciate “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” as a prime example of everyday English adaptability, and a sort of delicious one at that.
