Which brings us to "
peoplerazzi" — the coming wave of regular people who one day will realize that in their hands they hold something far more powerful than a cellular telephone (and in many countries beyond the U.S., the wave is rolling). Camera phones in the grip of the average person (billions of them) will leave no part of the earth undiscovered — and inevitably that will mean criminals caught in the act, celebrities snapped being all kinds of mundane [could the big-dollar days of paparazzi be over?] and, with luck, entirely new forms of entertainment and enlightenment for all of us to watch and experience.
—Rick Robinson, "Welcome,
peoplerazzi,"
Morph, February 9, 2006
Professional athletes are lavishly pampered and provocatively paid in our culture. They are pestered by the peoplerazzi — intrusive autograph hounds and hero worshipers who never let up. And in many cases, they become self-absorbed, irreverent and indifferent.
—Dan O'Neill, "When Legends Tour arrives, Cardinals take notice," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 9, 2003
The word is a rather awkward blend of
people and
paparazzi, the plural of
paparazzo, a freelance photographer who follows famous people hoping to get a newsworthy photo to sell to a magazine or newspaper.
Besides being hard to pronounce, this word suffers from another problem: what's the singular? Both people and paparazzi are plural, so the singular would have to apply to both parts: personrazzo? Yuck. I'll stick with nicer (and more popular) blend snaparazzi (singlular: snaparazzo).
