Talk:retro

The word "retro" in popular usage came to us through the common use of the word "retrospective" (as in thousands of articles and museum exhibits with titles like "A Retrospective of Mid-20th-Century Billboards in the American Southwest") and to a lesser extent from William Safire's coining of the neologism "retronym" in his New York Times column. So how about references to those in the etymology section(s) here? I'll leave it to someone with editing experience to consider the merits of this suggestion and make the changes, or not; this is not familiar ground for me. 98.247.224.9 09:11, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Apparently not. It's a common word element meaning "in a backwards direction", so it's related to all kinds of words, but etymologies in dictionaries consistently trace it to the French word. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:48, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Latin

@JohnC5: would you say a suffix *-trō was extracted from intrō/contrō and applied to re, or is there a cleaner explanation? supra, infra, extra, contra/contro, intra/intro are all explained as fossilised ablatives of old comparatives, but it doesn't seem to work for this word. --Barytonesis (talk) 20:45, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

@Barytonesis: I wouold say this was formed by analogy to intrō. I think that's about it. —*i̯óh₁nC^[5] 06:00, 8 December 2017 (UTC)