Not Quite

Yesterday I saw a sign which said a business was hiring--no surprise in this town--and was looking for "fulltime/partime workers".

I'm hoping beyond hope that the ghastly neologism "partime" isn't actually making its way into the language, although Google gives over 300,000 hits, nearly all of which use it as if it were a proper word (and not a clumsy version of the indisputably correct "part-time"). It looks vaguely French, it looks sloppy (as if someone couldn't even be bothered to write out the whole word), it looks wrong. And horrible.

I'm aware of the word "parboil", which seems to suggest that we can take the first chunk of "part" or "partial" and affix it to words, but in fact "parboil"--which means "to boil partially"--is an anomaly, an accident of the language. The original French version of the word, "parboillir", mean "to boil thoroughly"; the prefix "par-" is from Latin "per-", "through" (as in "through and through"). The current meaning of "parboil" was influenced by "part", it's true, but it's a one-off: "par-" isn't an affix and we don't just slap it in front of words we want to turn into partial versions of themselves. Especially not "-time".