Diacritiques

On Culture Vulture, the Guardian’s cultural news blog, Sarah Crown reports on the difficulties of turning Philip Pullman’s excellent and complex His Dark Materials trilogy into a film. The putative director, Chris Weitz, has just resigned from the job.

A little further on, there’s a paragraph on something I’d heard about before:

Weitz, who plans to continue working on the film as a scriptwriter, has already ruffled feathers by choosing to remove all references to religion from the film – presumably to boost its Stateside marketability - despite the fact that these form the very backbone of the books.

The expression Stateside marketability was new to me. Now, marketability might be a bit unwieldy, but isn’t new. In any event, English is very flexible about turning a noun, market, into a verb, and then applying the admissible suffixes, in this case -able, to create an adjective expressing the quality of being able to be marketed, which finally leads to the assorted noun.

But Stateside, referring of course to the United States of America — note the uppercase first letter — is a different matter entirely. And shouldn’t that be Statesside anyway?

[Addendum: Google finds one hit for Stateside marketability, and 499 for Stateside market. There’s even one with a visual that illustrates the term. None substituting Statesside; the deletion of the second s appears to be the preferred form.]