Evolving English

8:27pm: I saw it -istan-ing there
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In Slate, referring to something in the New York Times Magazine:

A cover line dubs Afghanistan "Warlordistan"

Quotation marks theirs. In the wake of our keen interest in Afghanistan in the last few years, the suffix "-istan" has been getting a bit of a workout as people play with turning it into a generic suffix. For instance, the term blogistan is, like, everywhere. Like, here, here, and here, which takes a crack at a definition ("The totality of blogs; blogs as a community").

It would be an interesting turn of events if we in English were to start using "-istan" as a general-purpose suffix meaning "place," since that's effectively what it means in actual placenames (Pakistan, Kurdistan). (There's a thread here on the etymology, if you're interested.) If so, the borrowing would be a kind of full circle -- a particle meaning "place" turned into placenames, imported into English as proper nouns, and then analyzed back into a consituent particle.

National Lampoon, um, lampoons this phenomenon here.