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My bae asked me about the meaning of mom-pkin in the book she's reading. I'm stunned and google searching produced but acronyms and chemical stuff. The full sentence is as follows.

She still had ninety minutes before she turned back into a mom-pkin. With a flirty toss of her head, she threw back the last of her drink and smiled at Lee.

Does it actually mean anything in general? As far she could tell, there's no specific property in the regarded person that she could point to as a possible meaning. Is it something like getting from a girly, frivolous type and back to a mom'ish, responsible one? What on Earth is the pkin suffix?

Additional definition: bae (or possibly BAE, as it's an acronym, stands for Before Anyone Else). This information's been added because many people asked about what it means.

Konrad Viltersten
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2 Answers2

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In the popular Cinderella fairy tale, a fairy turns the poor and dirty Cinderella into a princess and a pumpkin into the carriage that will get her to the party she wants to attend.

The spell, however, has a time limit: it will end at midnight.

What happens then is that the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

The word mom-pkin is a wordplay on the original story. The mom will turn back into a regular, boring mom once the time limit (90 minutes) has passed. So, the author thought that the Cinderella fairy tale was famous enough to take the same sentence and change pum into the similar-sounding mom, turning a pumpkin into a mompkin (which is not a real word).

The hyphen just makes it easier to spot the intent of the substitution. It serves a visual cue and it carries no grammatical meaning.

Zachiel
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  • While similar to another existing answer, I tried to explain the wordplay and the similarities between the situations more toroughly. – Zachiel Sep 17 '17 at 14:24
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    +1 for "the dash just makes it easier to spot the intent of the substitution". – TimR Sep 17 '17 at 14:39
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    Since the OP tried to look it up in a thesaurus, I think it's also worth noting that the word is not real. It's implied above, but not totally explicit. – Ringo Sep 17 '17 at 16:45
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    Since the author appears to be British, I wonder if the original text was mumpkin - a native Br.E reader might have appreciated the substitution without the (rather forced, IMHO) hyphen cue? – steeldriver Sep 18 '17 at 14:32
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    Funny anecdote about this phrase being used in weird ways: People at my workplace will say "John is about to turn into a pumpkin" to mean John (or whomever is named) has a meeting they have to leave for really soon so we have to wrap things up. – Kat Sep 18 '17 at 21:33
  • Very good answer. I'll speculate a bit further, although more story context would help: seems likely to me that the woman in the story is a (presumably) single mother who found the chance to doll herself up for a date (or to go bar hopping), something she rarely has time or opportunity to do. 90 minutes might be when the babysitter has to leave, or when a child's nap is expected to be over, and she has to resume her typical "mom" role. – BradC Sep 18 '17 at 22:32
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In storytelling contexts, the words turned back into a will be, nine times out of ten, an allusion to the fairy tale known as Cinderella.

If you do an ngram search for turned back into a *, pumpkin is very high on the list. At the stroke of midnight, the magical carriage in that tale turns back into the pumpkin from which it is made. The heroine is partying at a ball at the castle, where she hopes to encounter her Prince Charming. She too will transform, back into a drudge.

The suffix of pumpkin is actually -kin. It is a diminutive. {noun}-kin is a "little" {noun}. NOTE: pkin is not a bona-fide morphological suffix here but simply an allusion to the spelling of the word pumpkin, so that the word pumpkin will come to mind, and summon up the Cinderella story where, at the stroke of midnight, the female heroine's magical carriage turns back into a pumpkin and she herself turns from party-girl back into drudge.

P.S. Since @Lawrence asks "If pumpkin is the little guy, what's the big version :)"

If I were to answer Lawrence's jest, I'd say the big guy is occupied by Peter Pumpkin-Eater's wife. But seriously, diminutives can express both appreciation (tenderness, affection) and depreciation (irony, disparagement, derision—the idea that something is inferior). The pumpkin was regarded as fodder and as a rather crude food for humans, or as food for rather crude humans.

I should add that it is not always clear to native speakers that -kin is a diminutive. For example, a "manikin", a shop-window display dummy, is more-or-less life-size (though usually not realistically so), and few native speakers recognize the -kin as a diminutive there. Though since the dummy is only a dummy, no more than a basic human shape, often lacking hands and feet, the diminutive could be understood to mean "a lesser human", "a mere human shape". More importantly, unlike cognate -chen in German, -kin is not very productive in Modern English; that is to say, relatively few words get formed with it.

TimR
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  • I generally agree, the only problem seems to be here that it was Cinderella's paraphernalia turned back into a pumpkin, she was not. Then, it's either a bad metaphor or an author's exploitation of both pumpkin/bumpkin at the same time. – Michael Login Sep 17 '17 at 11:34
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    @Mv Log: I think you're being too literal-minded. Allusion doesn't have to establish a perfect correspondence: a:b :: c:d in all details. Allusion can simply evoke a context which is generally applicable to the narrated situation. – TimR Sep 17 '17 at 11:37
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    @MvLog You can call it a bad metaphor if you like, but the key point is that people do use it that way, and the goal here is to understand the patterns in how people use language. –  Sep 17 '17 at 11:44
  • The -*pkin* suffix and the rhyming of mum-pkin with pumpkin suggest the imagery you describe. A pumpkin isn't a little pump, though. – Lawrence Sep 17 '17 at 12:18
  • @Lawrence: but it is. Don't be misled by orthography. The "true" suffix (not the suffix as spelled here for the sake of the visual clue) is -kin. The pronunciation of the word (pun-kin) goes back to a word of French origin. – TimR Sep 17 '17 at 14:14
  • @Tᴚoɯɐuo If pumpkin is the little guy, what's the big version :) ? Out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology. It seems to indicate that the spelling is a phonetic alteration of an earlier spelling, rather than one with a -kin diminutive suffix. – Lawrence Sep 17 '17 at 14:24
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    @Lawrence: You are misreading that entry. The -kin ending of "pumpkin" var. "punkin" is not derived from the -ion ending of pompion. The Oxford English Dictionary says "An altered form of pumpion, with the ending conformed to the suffix -KIN". Compare lambkin, bodkin, manikin, etc. – TimR Sep 17 '17 at 14:37
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    The first half of this answer is solid, but the discussion of the -kin suffix distracting and irrelevant. The author of the original text is not using a suffix; "mom-pkin" is a portmanteau of "mom" and "pumpkin". – Xerxes Sep 17 '17 at 15:46
  • @Xerxes: the second half of the answer is responding to/correcting the OP's "What on Earth is the pkin suffix" and responding to a comment by Lawrence. The author's portmanteau use is further proof of what I said, that native speakers do not always recognize the -kin suffix for what it is. That is hardly "irrelevant", but I'd agree to call it "tangential". If you're "distracted" by it, that's on you. – TimR Sep 17 '17 at 16:24
  • @Xerxes: Maybe you think the suffix discussion is "distracting and irrelevant", but I find it at least as interesting as the original question. Though I wonder if kin in pumpkin is a suffix - that is, added to some original pump-like root - or just a syllable? – jamesqf Sep 17 '17 at 17:09
  • @jamesqf "1640s, alteration of pompone, pumpion "melon, pumpkin" (1540s), from Middle French pompon, from Latin peponem (nominative pepo) "melon," from Greek pepon "melon," probably originally "cooked (by the sun)," hence "ripe;" from peptein "to cook" (see cook (n.)). ." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pumpkin – Hatshepsut Sep 17 '17 at 18:50
  • @jamesqf As OP I need to point out that my intention was to merely get the meaning of the term. The mentioning of the suffix was nothing more but an attempt to help other help me combined with presenting a proof of self-effort. So for me, personally, the suffix matter is only a bonus. Nevertheless, I found it interesting, once it's come into presence. – Konrad Viltersten Sep 17 '17 at 18:57
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    Your digression on "-kin" could be misconstrued as claiming the original quote suggests the sentence's subject will become a diminutive, lesser, or endeared mom. "-kin" may be relevant to the etymology of "pumpkin" itself, but the only purpose of the letters "-pkin" in this sentence is to suggest the word "pumpkin" as a whole. – aschepler Sep 17 '17 at 23:04
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    @MvLog It might not make a lot of sense, but the idiom "turn into a pumpkin" is in fact often applied to people. At a party, I'll often hear someone say something like "I'd better get home before I turn into a pumpkin." – aschepler Sep 17 '17 at 23:06
  • pumpkin - From Middle French pompon, from Latin pepō, from Ancient Greek πέπων (pépōn, “large melon”), from πέπων (pépōn, “ripe”), from πέπτω (péptō, “ripen”). Suffixed with the now obsolete -kin. -kin (now chiefly dialectal) Used to form adjectives expressing resemblance or likeness to, similar to -like. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pumpkin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-kin – CJ Dennis Sep 18 '17 at 03:26
  • @CJ Dennis: So the -kin here is a suffix, but not the current diminuitive one. – jamesqf Sep 18 '17 at 03:53
  • @CJ Dennis: a related suffix, kins, is still quite productive. What shall we do tonight, babykins? Dinner and a movie? – TimR Sep 18 '17 at 11:07