The curious world of cutthroat words, to which Mickey Blake has added one, namely The Frida Diaries' title of Princess Wigglebutt.
The curious world of cutthroat words, to which Mickey Blake has added one, namely The Frida Diaries' title of Princess Wigglebutt.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
The most common kind of compound word is what's called "endocentric:" it includes the thing that it is. So a houseboat is a kind of boat; a shoe salesman is a kind of salesman; a whoremonger is a kind of monger. (That being an old word for a dealer or trader) The second most common is "exocentric:" made out of nouns and adjectives, but not including the thing that it is. (e.g., a loudmouth is not a kind of mouth, but a kind of person.)
This is all about a third category: exocentric compounds that are built out of verbs, which describe what the thing does. Brianne Hughes wrote her master's thesis on these, where she named them "cutthroat compounds," after such an example: A cutthroat is someone who cuts throats.
These are surprisingly rare in English, but are common among kids: apparently, children go through a phase where they spontaneously generate lots of these, and then stop.
This is what's called a "productive" grammar: you can make up new ones and people will understand you, so if I call someone a lack-faith or Bob Stealhorse people will understand me. But they don't fit naturally into English grammar, because English is what's called a "head-initial" language: you tend to put the most significant part of a phrase or sentence first. Since English verbs have to go before their objects, this gets it backwards; it sounds like more natural English to call someone "faithless" or a "horse-thief." That's why, apart from a few cases which happened to survive, English has relatively few cutthroat compounds.
But the few we keep are pretty great, and tend to be very evocative: a sawbones, a killjoy, a slingshot. (And some, like "breakfast," become so common that we even forget that they're compound words) Apparently they dominantly fall into three categories: occupational names, local nature-words, and insults.
What it says about us that we primarily use these especially colorful compounds to describe just what we think of one another, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
h/t Laura Gibbs.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/05/22/cutthroat_compounds_in_english_morphology_kickass_scarecrow_killjoy_and.html?utm_content=bufferfbc38&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
The most common kind of compound word is what's called "endocentric:" it includes the thing that it is. So a houseboat is a kind of boat; a shoe salesman is a kind of salesman; a whoremonger is a kind of monger. (That being an old word for a dealer or trader) The second most common is "exocentric:" made out of nouns and adjectives, but not including the thing that it is. (e.g., a loudmouth is not a kind of mouth, but a kind of person.)
This is all about a third category: exocentric compounds that are built out of verbs, which describe what the thing does. Brianne Hughes wrote her master's thesis on these, where she named them "cutthroat compounds," after such an example: A cutthroat is someone who cuts throats.
These are surprisingly rare in English, but are common among kids: apparently, children go through a phase where they spontaneously generate lots of these, and then stop.
This is what's called a "productive" grammar: you can make up new ones and people will understand you, so if I call someone a lack-faith or Bob Stealhorse people will understand me. But they don't fit naturally into English grammar, because English is what's called a "head-initial" language: you tend to put the most significant part of a phrase or sentence first. Since English verbs have to go before their objects, this gets it backwards; it sounds like more natural English to call someone "faithless" or a "horse-thief." That's why, apart from a few cases which happened to survive, English has relatively few cutthroat compounds.
But the few we keep are pretty great, and tend to be very evocative: a sawbones, a killjoy, a slingshot. (And some, like "breakfast," become so common that we even forget that they're compound words) Apparently they dominantly fall into three categories: occupational names, local nature-words, and insults.
What it says about us that we primarily use these especially colorful compounds to describe just what we think of one another, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
h/t Laura Gibbs.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/05/22/cutthroat_compounds_in_english_morphology_kickass_scarecrow_killjoy_and.html?utm_content=bufferfbc38&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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