Academic fields of study are generally named by creating a compound word based on Latin or Greek roots. There are the “-ologies,” like “geology,” where the suffix comes from the Greek root “logos,” which means “to speak.” If you’re in one of those fields, you’re qualified “to speak of it.” Then there are the “-onomies,” like “astronomy.” In this case the root of the suffix is “-nomy,” another Greek root. This one means “management” or “arrangement,” so if you’re an “astronomer” you know how the stars are arranged. If you’re a “taxonomer” you manage categories and lists.
Fairly recently a new construction has appeared, yielding terms for new areas such as “genomics,” “proteomics” and “glycomics.” Those are the studies, respectively, of a genome, proteins, and sugars within organisms. There’s something unusual about the new construction, though, which uses the suffix “-omics.” It turns out that while it sounds like some versions of “-nomy,” like “economics,” it’s missing the “n” and it’s not etymologically based on any Greek or Latin root. It just sounds like it. It seems to be a compound construction itself, made up of two different suffixes: “-ics” (a branch of knowledge) tacked onto “-ome.” The “-ome” is an existing suffix meaning “having a distinct nature,” and it sounds like a word like “genome” uses it, but it doesn’t. “Genome” itself is a compound word created from “gene” and “chromosome,” so the “-ome” in that case really comes from “-some,” which is from the Greek word “soma” (body).
Some of the “-omics” have different derivations altogether. “Reaganomics,” for example, is a not-very-rigorous term for a vague combination of economic ideas, and the “-omics” there comes from the ending of “economics” and is really “-nomics.” Because “Reagan” ends with an “n”, it was an easy stretch to combine it with “economics” — after all, you don’t really hear about “Bushonomics” or “Carteronomics” even though every US president takes their own unique approach to commerce and trade. Made-up words are often made up that way primarily because they sound good and are easy to say and remember.
Presidents also often have their own unique relationships with language. G.W. Bush was well known for his somewhat fraught association with words and phrases — this was the president who said something was “misunderestimated,” after all. But many of his constructions, accidental or not, followed the same principles that gave us “Reaganomics” — they sound good and are pretty easy to say. He used one word like that in 2002 that many people thought he had made up: “kerfuffle.” He didn’t make that one up, though; “kerfuffle”, which means a minor mix-up or commotion, is reasonably common, particularly in England. There was a minor kerfuffle about the spelling of “kerfuffle” a few decades ago, in the 1960s. Up to that point it had been spelled with a “c” instead of a “k”, and it had a number of spellings, from “curfuffle” to “cafuffle” to “cafoufle.” Spelling variations are not unusual for casual words that are spoken much more often than they are written down. It’s not clear why the spelling of “kerfuffle” changed from “c” to “k”, nor why it fairly quickly stabilized that way. It’s a field ripe for study; perhaps we could call it “kerfomics.”
