Re: [Lingo] マニュアルチック

[David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com>]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012, at 08:03, Stephen A. Carter wrote:
> Nguyễn Vũ Hưng wrote:
> > What is the meaning of "マニュアルチック", is that borrowed from "manual
> > chick"? what is the meaning of this phase?
>
> Given the automotive context, I wonder if it's not the "-tic" from
> "automatic," and if the word isn't a coinage describing some kind of
> pseudo-manual mode of an automatic transmission.

I don't have an authoritative answer, but I have a strong feeling that
this is an adverbializing loan-suffix, backformed from words like
ロマンチック。 It actually might come from some other particular word than
this.  I recall noticing a very odd case of a word several years ago
where the チック was quite clearly being used as a suffix in this way -
unfortunately I can no longer remember that example.

In this case, we have マニュアルチック＊に＊, and one might question why
the need for チック if we have に, and again I can't offer an authoritative
theory, but it may be simply to augment to adverbial-ness of the
expression. In other words, I read this example (sorry, I aggressively
trimmed it out as a knee-jerk reaction to the recent list-iquette uproar
on main list :-) as

  "You can manually shift it up-down"

I would love to get some native-speaker input on this question. Maybe
I'll just ask my wife when I get home :-) :-)

Dave