April 2006

Talking about words:   Let’s have a look-see

With Richard W. Bailey

English loves to make big words out of littler ones, and it’s done so since the Spear-Danes we read about in Beowulf. Love for such words has flourished recently, and English now offers a heap of them.

Noun + noun = noun: wardrobe malfunction, eye candy, mallrat, pole dancing, snail mail.

Adjective + noun = noun: best woman, flat panel, soft core.

Noun + adjective = noun: bananas Foster, code red, latte grande.

Adverb + verb = verb: back-draft, fast-track, slow-cook.

Verb + preposition = noun: come-along, comb-over, dropout.

Preposition + noun = verb: outsource, overachieve, upload.

Verb + particle = verb: buyout, turn on, piss off.

Verb + noun = noun: mosh pit, search engine, think pad.

Phrasal compounds of several kinds: in-your-face, outasight, well-to-do.

These categories (but not the examples) come from a mid-20th-century book on English, but something was overlooked: the combination of verb + verb.

Some of these are quite old. Look-see first appears in print in 1854 in the Pidgin English of the Pacific trade, originally as makee look-see—parallel to the phrase have a look (a)round in the wider world of English.

More recent verb compounds include:  sleep-walk (1923), kick-start (1928), hang-glide (1930), blow-dry (1966), get-go (1966), slam-dunk (1972), spell-check (c1980), break-dance (1982), hack-crack (2001). The verbs don’t even have to be different: win-win (1977), lose-lose (1978).

We just love to cut-and-paste.

Attentive readers will have noticed that some of these combinations are written as one word, others as two, and still others with hyphens. What’s the rule?

Of course there isn’t one. One purist declares that the no-hyphen [sic] style “seems aesthetically superior.” But he then turns around and approves of a prior purist who was fervently in favor of the hyphens—or at least some of them. “Nothing,” said this earlier gent, “gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark or punctuation or that employs it where it is not wanted.”

Go figure.

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003--a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.