One of the more endearing features of English is how easy it is to create a new word. The simplest way of all is to simply glue two existing words together.
Most compound words have a short half-life (there’s another one). But a lucky few, like toothbrush, mousepad and starstruck tend to stick.
What may surprise you is how common on-the-spot compounding is. In 1988 linguist Richard Sproat made a list of all the distinct words used in the forty-four million words of text from Associated Press over a ten-and-a-half-month period ending on December 30. He found 300,000, about the number you’d find in a decent unabridged dictionary.
Now, how many new words do you think he found on December 31? Thirty-five. Among them, counterprograms, armhole, part-Vulcan, boulderlike, mega-lizard and ex-critters – compound words all.
One feature of compound words that we tend not to notice is they don’t have to be joined, even by a hyphen (think of water bomb and apple pie). Linguists have dealt with this phenomenon on our behalf by dubbing a compound that uses a space an “open” or “spaced” compound, and one that is joined or hyphenated a “closed” compound. What’s more, compound nouns that began life spaced or hyphenated can, over time, become solid. Hence the maxim beloved of style guide editors: “Compound nouns tend to solidify as they age.”
The tendency to not solidify compound names in their early days distinguishes English from the other Germanic languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and Dutch. For them, it would be an error to separate the component parts of a written compound word. The result can be exceptionally long, multi-word expressions, such as the German rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, which means insurance companies that provide legal protection. Germans, in a rare display of humour, have dubbed such elongations “Bandwurmwörter”, or tapeworm words. It’s also what led Mark Twain to observe that some German words are so long that “they have a perspective”. “These things are not words,” he added, “they are alphabetical processions.”
You may be wondering whether there’s a limit, then, on how long such words can get. Theoretically, no, but in practice, of course there is. (While humour may not be their strong suit, you can’t accuse the Germans of being stupid.) According to Wikipedia, compounds longer than three components are rare in any of the Germanic languages.
Now here’s a question: If I’m talking to you about my dark room, how do you know whether I’m talking about somewhere I developed photos in the days before Kodak went belly up, or an ordinary room that I painted black?
Of course, context usually does the trick. But another device in speech, so natural that we don’t notice we’re doing it, is placing the stress on the first syllable of compound words. A darkroom is a place for developing photos, and may not be painted dark at all. A dark room, on the other hand, really is dark, and could be used for anything. Until the invention of photography, saying darkroom would have sounded as weird as saying whiterabbit would today.
One reason for the abundance of compound words is that anyone can create a new one at the drop of a hat, as my then-eight-year-old son did the day he yelled “chickenhead!” at a driver he disapproved of. Heaven knows where he learned that kind of behaviour from. His mother, I expect.
Another feature of compound words is their ability to mean something other than the sum of their parts. Meathead means idiot (as, presumably, does chickenhead), a cowslip is a flower, courtship has nothing to do with the judicial system or boats, and a wildflower is not the same as a wild flower, as the graffiti-ist above has somewhat grumpily (and antisocially, it must be said) pointed out. Such compounds are called exocentric.
On the other hand, sometimes compound words do more or less equal the sum of their parts, and they’re considered endocentric. Think of skinhead, cowbell and shiphold. These compounds can be further divided into a head (the bell in cowbell), which contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and the modifier, which restricts the meaning of the head (it’s not just any bell, it’s a cowbell).
If it was always crystal clear which compound words were figurative and which were literal, life would be simple. But words have a habit of shifting meaning, often subtly, and compound words that begin life in the literal camp can, over time, become figurative. Masthead, a word from the 1700s, originally meant the head of a ship’s mast, where the flags flew. By the mid-1800s it was also being used figuratively to refer to the top of the title page of a newspaper or magazine, and that’s the sense that predominates today.
Compound words are also distinct from portmanteau words like smog and brunch, where the component words have not merely been jammed together, but morphed to form a new word whose meaning is somehow a combination of the two. Smog, for example, is a smushed together version of smoke and fog.
It’s the combinative aspect that gives portmanteau words an element of surprise and amusement, as well as the opportunity for tiresome clichés. Slapping -aholic onto the back of any activity the people overdo is itself now, surely, sufficiently overdone. Similarly with -geddon for anything that’s unlikely to end well.
But these are minor quibbles. You have to love the flexibility of the language and the way it allows any of us to invent a new word any time we feel like it. Even eight year olds who have obviously been spending way too much time hanging out with bad company.
Cartoon of the week
Bits and specious
If you think small talk is unbecoming of serious business people, it may be time to think again.
These days Richard Sproat works for Google as a computational linguist researching text normalisation (used for converting text to speech) and speech recognition.
His personal website says that as a computational linguist he has something in common with grapefruit. More here.
Quote of the week
My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.
Mark Twain
My favorite real German word is Kathodenstrahlabstimmungsabzeiger. Cathode-ray tuning indicator, more commonly known as a Magic Eye tube.
Thank you! This is very helpful :)