“Substantialiscious”

This word is used in Snick­ers’ new ad cam­paign, wherein they plas­ter these long, awk­ward neol­o­gisms (e.g., “Peanu­topo­lis,” “Hun­gerec­tomy,” etc.) on buses and bill­boards and on their candy bar wrap­pers themselves.

What struck me about this one is that any­body read­ing it would promptly assume that it is a fusion of “sub­stan­tial” and “deli­cious”; but wouldn’t that pro­duce “sub­stan­tia­li­cious,” not “-scious”? In fact, the only words that end in “-scious” are “lus­cious” and the var­i­ous forms of con­scious­ness. I don’t think they meant to evoke lus­cious­ness, and even if they did, shouldn’t they have coined “Sub­stan­tialuscious”?

Things got worse when I opened the wrapper:

Sub­stan­tialis­cious \sub-‘stan(t)-shu-‘li-shus\
(noun). The weight of some­thing when you weigh it with your tongue.

It is, of course, an adjec­tive, a fact that a con­trib­u­tor to Urban Dic­tio­nary even tried to point out, albeit incorrectly.

It’s an easy tar­get, I know, but I’m just gen­uinely sur­prised that they let some­thing like that get out the door; it’s a fairly clever cam­paign, and “Hun­gerec­tomy” in par­tic­u­lar pre­sup­poses that the aver­age per­son is smart enough to know what the suf­fix “-ectomy” means. And wouldn’t some­body who knows that also know an adjec­tive from a noun? It’s just confusing.