Q: What’s the difference between having a SQUIRREL FACE and having a FACE SQUIRREL?
A:
Generally speaking, if you want a word for a MORP that has FUZ, you call it a FUZ-MORP, right? And if there’s a FUZ that gets rid of your MORPS, you call it a MORP-FUZ. That’s just how our language works when it wants to compress things that affect other things into one noun. What term goes first or second is governed by what’s called headedness, and it’s neat, once you notice it (which you don’t, because language).
A recent xkcd comic proposes that we ditch lexical precision in favour of compound headedness:
[I enter the quibble that “lifeboat” is not in fact a boat that holds boats; rather it is a boat held by boats — this shipship is a boatboat in the sense the chart implies — but that is by the by.]
Now, by nature or by accident there must be plenty of words like “boathouse”, which have a “houseboat” counterpart firmly established in the lexicon. (Whether by nature or accident might be something for a linguist to probe). Read More