Quote: “You know it’s a grim summer-movie season when mediocre rom-coms starring a Wilson brother open two weeks in a row. ” Movie review of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” by Dana Stevens in Slate.Figure of Speech: apocope (a-PO-co-pee), the word compacter.
For all you computer geeks, rom-com means romantic comedy, not “read-only memory communication.” The phrase joins two apocopes (“shorten”), a figure that kills the last part of a word.
But rom-com is a particular kind of apocope, and one that’s increasingly popular. It twins with a rhyming cut-off word, as in SoHo, lit crit (literary criticism), and Ab Fab (“Absolutely Fabulous,” darling). So Figaro will just have to conjure a new figure:
Henceforth, the term for consecutive rhyming abbreviated words is repcope (REP-cope), as in “repetitive cope.” Yes, that mixes English with Greek. But restaurants in London do it successfully, and so will Figaro.
Snappy Answer: “Mediocre” and “Wilson brother” are redundant.