“Cutthroat Compounds”

This piece of etymology trivia truly delighted me: A cutthroat compound is when the verb comes first in a descriptive phrase, instead of the adjective that English usually uses. As Adam Aleksic tells us here, the cutthroat compounds are mostly insults and probably influenced by French grammar, which is just perfect. “How can I be really insulting?” the 16th century English thought. “I know! I’ll treat it like a French phrase.” Wonderful.

 

 

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Word Tweets

Language Twitter is the best part of that hellsite so here are some tweets from which I’ve gained knowledge and joy lately:

Learning!

I’m on Twitter a little more these days because I cleaned up my feed with this tool and now I get much, much less angry politics and more delightful content like this:

(That account is full of great word facts, such as why a type of paper is called “foolscap“, something I have wondered over a lifetime of reading British novels.)

Oh, German

Sometimes I want to learn German, if only because there are words like this:

smultronställe: (n.) lit. “place of wild strawberries”; a special place discovered, treasured, returned to for solace and relaxation; a personal idyll free from stress or sadness.

(Via my old fav, even cleveland.)