You may have noticed a few chapters ago that Thomas Nashe’s sixteenth-century reprehenders complained not only about verbs he had formed with -ize, but also about his ‘boystrous compound wordes’. In the 1590s, Nashe gave the language its first known uses of owl-light, meaning ‘dusk’; of potluck, as we still use it; of gravedigger, ditto; of chatmate, meaning exactly what it sounds as though it means; and also (to the delight of anyone who ever stumbles across it) of windfucker, as a variant term for a kestrel. He is credited with the adjectives homespun and frostbitten; with the verb to brickwall, not unlike the modern verb to stonewall; and with the idea of an afterlife—though by this, disturbingly, he meant ‘old age’. These are all examples of compounds, in which, in the most general terms, two or more words that stand happily alone have been spliced.** Nashe used analogy to defend his ‘boisterousness’ in creating his compound forms, noting that apothecaries were wont to give curatives made of mixed ingredients, and promising that a person had only to ‘graft wordes as men do their trees, to make them more fruitfull’.
The term chatmate may sound modern for 1599; but what about stopgap, which is half a century older, or busybody from William Tyndale’s 1526 version of the New Testament?** Actually, these words are all recent set beside our earliest compounds. It is lovely to imagine harebells in 1387, touching that sweetheart can be found in 1290, terrific that we have had Christmas since 1123. However, compounding in English goes back much, much further still. The words earð or ‘earth’, and land, in evidence from around 725, were put together in the dawn of recorded English to give yrðland or ‘earth-land’, meaning arable land. Comparably remote, the hydgild was a fine paid in place of being flogged: the first part meant ‘hide’ or skin, while a gild or ‘yield’ was a payment made in recompense, a sense of yield that can be dated back to 604. Other venerable compounds from among countless examples include regnwyrm or ‘rain-worm’, our earthworm, so called then because worms like to come up out of the ground when it is drizzly; biabread or ‘bee-bread’, a honeycomb with the honey still in it; musfealle or ‘mouse-fall’, a mousetrap; and the gangpyt or ‘go-hole’, otherwise a privy: we preserve gang for the broad meaning of ‘go’ in such words as gangplank and gangway. And if ‘bee-bread’, ‘hide-yield’ and ‘mouse-fall’ are no longer used in English, headache certainly is, which dates from around the year 1000.**
As Nashe implied, a compound word has the potential to be more than the obvious sum of its parts. Among those examples listed above that come from his writing, the noun chatmate may be literal, but the verb to brickwall is metaphorical, and a kestrel imagined as a windfucker glides with lyrical ambiguity between the two. Speakers of the earliest known version of what we call English fashioned numerous of these poetic compounds so as to multiply the meanings that could be wrung from the individual elements of their language. The term ‘kenning’,** taken from medieval Icelandic, is used for the roundabout or metaphorical ornaments found in Old Norse writing, and kennings were much used in Old English too. Thus banhus or ‘bone-house’ invoked the body, and merehengest or ‘sea-steed’, a ship. In another antique example, modhord, the first part, mod, is the etymological forebear of the modern word mood, and shares Indo-European roots with mode. In early Old English, however, it had meanings akin to inner spirit, soul, thought, heart, desire, and more. Hord, meanwhile, ‘store’ or ‘treasure’, gives us the present-day hoard. The word modhord or ‘mood-hoard’ could therefore be thought of as meaning something like ‘treasure trove of thought and soul’. But in practice it is usually translated with the word mind, which is snappier, but perhaps no more illuminating.
The poetic nature of compounds leaves obvious potential for changes in their sense. The merehengest or ‘sea-steed’, we have seen, was a ship. Its equivalent, seahorse, was first used in English as a name, not for the little upright fish, but for a walrus. The earliest meaning of deaþbed or ‘death-bed’ was a grave. When Shakespeare coined bedroom, he meant space in a bed. And for four and a half centuries, wormhole, also credited to Shakespeare, meant a hole made by a worm: only in 1957 was wormhole adopted to describe hypothetical channels in space and time. In the nineteenth century, to die hard was criminal slang meaning—according to the 1823 edition of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—to ‘shew no signs of fear or contrition at the gallows; not to whiddle** or squeak’; felons were urged to take death without a murmur ‘for the honour of the gang’. But when diehard entered military slang as a noun, hard was taken to imply the exact opposite of this impressive restraint, so that a diehard has come to be understood as one who, against overwhelming odds, puts up maximum resistance. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens confidently upturned the normal sense of old-fashioned, and used it instead to describe a ‘small slipshod girl’ who seemed to have been created ancient from the word go.
Previous chapters in this book are dotted with examples of compounds that are hundreds of years old: hogwash, pitfall, bugbear, and so on. But new compounds are also constantly being formed in English. Sometimes this is because a novel entity needs naming—shell shock and clickbait, a bar-code and a tape deck, to kick-start, spacewalk and photobomb. Sometimes, however, a new compound merely gives edge to an existing idea—badass, dickweed, shitstorm, groupthink, cold-call, scope-creep. And then there are new compounds whose appeal lies, for the most part, in their being pithy, nailing what it previously took a whole phrase to express—the verb rage-quit: to abandon a task in a state of foot-stamping frustration;** buzzkill: to quench a general mood of excitement;** hot-desk: to maximise the value of a single workspace by splitting its use between several workers across more hours than one alone would be able or willing to labour; friend-zone: to keep at arm’s length a suitor who is charming, delightful, and so on—but no more than that, whom one would like to retain, if humanly possible, as a pal.
It perhaps hardly needs saying at this point that the business of sticking two words together to make a third is among the easier ways to come up with a repulsive novelty. And if you struggle to make an impression this way, you can at least take comfort from the failed efforts of acknowledged geniuses. Read Shakespeare, and you will meet many such inventions that died a death—the nouns clotpole and counter-caster; the adjectives highlone and nookshotten, ‘of irregular, angled form’ according to the OED; the verbs to weather-fend and land-damn—which not even the OED can explain. Sir Philip Sidney coined fear-babes and navel-string. Milton gave homefelt a whirl. Gerard Manley Hopkins tried spendsavour; James Joyce, smilesmirk; and on and on. At the same time, many literary efforts have stuck. Shakespeare is also credited with giving us lacklustre, eyeball, dewdrop and fairyland; Sidney, with inventing the deathblow. Milton appears to have coined awestruck; Dryden, day-dream; Coleridge, soulmate.
If you feel timid about putting words together like this but still have a yen to use compounds in your campaign, verbifying existing compounds is a good alternative manoeuvre—bound to set the gripers shuddering. As ever, there are plenty of established examples of this move that nobody now notices or dislikes. What of the sixteenth-century buttonhole becoming the nineteenth-century ‘to buttonhole’; the seventeenth-century ring-fence becoming the eighteenth-century ‘to ringfence’; the eighteenth-century side-step becoming the twentieth-century ‘to side-step’; or the seventeenth-century pinpoint becoming the twentieth-century ‘to pinpoint’? All of these oddities, as they must once have seemed, are now established within Good English, but no agreeable precedent along these lines will stop the wretched griper fuming at new examples: among our lexical fearbabes, unfamiliarity breeds contempt. The author of each of the quotations below will have caused anguish to many a naysayer. By learning from their efforts, you could too:
Business leaders in Davos keen to mainstream circular economy. (Guardian)
City should ‘watchdog’ its own problems. (Baltimore Sun)
Walker Said To Handshake On Statewide Voucher Plan. (WPR News)
Don’t broad-brush the semiconductor market. (EDN Network)
FSA calls on IFAs to ‘sense-check’ risk profiling approach. (Moneymarketing)
My career as a chef has been springboarded by at least five years. (Chicago Tribune)
The prospective purchaser chooses not to stakehold the deposits … (Estate Agents Authority, Hong Kong)