Bear cats aren't cats. Or bears.

This tweet appeared in my timeline today:

KILLER WHALES aren’t whales. SLOWWORMS aren’t worms. HORNY TOADS aren’t toads. BEARCATS aren’t cats. (Or bears.) pic.twitter.com/23MSQZqDjd

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) August 23, 2016

All of this is useful and important information, and it's cool how things get to be named things that they aren't, but the linguistic point I wanted to make is in relation to the last one.

Each of these has two parts to its name, either an adjective plus a noun (slow+worm, horny+toad) or two nouns (killer+whale, bear+cat). (I've analysed 'killer' as a noun here, but I suppose it might be an adjective too - it doesn't much matter.) In each case, it's the second part that tells you the type of thing that it is (or isn't): a worm, a toad, a whale, a cat. That's because when you put two things together in language, you (nearly) always have one that's the 'head' and the other part modifies the head in some way. Here, it tells you what type of worm/toad/whale it is: a slow one, a horny one, a killer one. This is a general fact of English: the Right-Hand Head Rule.

This means that even when the two parts of a compound are nouns and either could theoretically be the head (a bear cat could be a type of cat or a type of bear), we interpret the right-hand element as the head. This is evident from the wording of the tweet, where we're told they're not a type of cat, and the fact that they're also not bears is added as a humorous parenthetical, just in case we were tempted to think that.

Words-combining

German is famous for its compounds. I'm not sure this is fair, really, because as far as I can tell it just doesn't write the spaces (I'm being facetious - but there is a conceptual issue here). No matter. It is famous for them. I said to my first years the other day that while English can't have plurals within compounds (eg it's toothbrush, not teethbrush, even though it's a brush for your teeth), German can. And this is true: bookshelf in German is Bücherregal, literally booksshelf. But it's not that simple. This is language we're talking about, after all.

German and English can both have irregular plurals in compounds, as well as singulars. English can have teethmarks, for instance (although personally I would prefer toothmarks). But neither language can have regular plurals in compounds, so we have mice eater but not rats eater and Bücherregal but not Autosberg ('cars heap'). (Links go to articles testing this idea.) The difference is that German has many more irregular plurals: their default (=regular) plural is the -s suffix that I mentioned in my Euros post. All the others, which put together are way more common, are in effect irregular.

Web developer - literally

This screenshot and associated comment are linguistically interesting for (at least) two reasons:

The first reason is the meaning of the phrase 'web developer'. This is Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web (which is different from the internet in slightly complicated ways). Therefore, he is a web developer in the everyday sense of the term, in which he writes code or whatever it is that web developers do, but he is also the person who developed the web - literally, the web developer.

This is an insight into the way that the meaning of compounds in English (and other languages) can be arbitrary, in that a blackboard is a board that is black while a washboard is not a board that is wash, but also follow common patterns. So we can't know out of context that 'web developer' is a developer for the web, we just have to know that that's what it conventionally means. But we can make predictions based on common ways of combining words to make compounds. You wouldn't expect a hand mixer to be a thing that mixes hands, for instance - you'd expect it to be a mixer that is operated by hand, as that's more sensible. But grammatically, both are possible. The former is what's known as a synthetic compound, in which the first part (in English) is the object of the verb in the second part. So a hand mixer mixes hands, a lorry driver drives lorries, and a web developer develops the web. The latter doesn't have this relationship between the parts. Instead, the first part modifies the thing in the second part. A hand mixer is a mixer that is hand-powered, a safe driver is a driver who is safe, and a web developer is a developer who works on the web.

Secondly, this is a good example of the way a word can switch to meaning the exact opposite of what it used to mean. I'm talking about 'modest' in the comment above the photo. Modest is my contender for 'Word Most Likely To Mean Its Opposite In Fifty Years'. It's mostly used nowadays (in my unscientific opinion) in fossilised phrases like 'modest income' or in a sarcastic sense ('Oh, modest as well!' when someone boasts). That to me is prime material for reanalysis as its own antonym. For that to happen, there has to be some confusion or obfuscation of the meaning. In that comment, it's not clear if the commenter is being sarcastic (ie using the 'invented the web' reading of the job title) or genuine (using the 'programmer' meaning). Someone for whom the word means 'proud' or 'boastful' could interpret it their way, and one more instance of modest means the opposite of what it does to someone else. If they then use it in an unambiguous way to mean 'proud', well, that meaning scores one more point and semantic shift marches on.

Fox gloves and puns

I've got a pair of gloves (those fingerless ones with mittens that flip off so that you can work your phone) that have a fox design, from Primark:

Fox gloves from Primark [photo source]

I've been wearing them for some time, and refer to them as my 'fox gloves'. I shift the primary stress to the first syllable (FOXgloves), indicating that I consider this to be a compound. During the time I've owned these gloves I've said the word 'foxglove', referring to the flower. And yet I've never, not once, realised that it would be hilariously witty to refer to them as foxgloves until this morning, when I wasn't even wearing them (it's proper winter glove weather now).

This is testament to the power of our language faculty to keep homophones apart. Puns wouldn't work, for instance, if we were constantly aware of similar-sounding strings. There's a joke which goes like this:

Two cats, one called OneTwoThree and one called UnDeuxTrois, were having a swimming race. Why did OneTwoThree win?

Because UnDeuxTrois cat sank! 

This joke works because UnDeuxTrois cat sank is exactly homophonous with un deux trois quatre cinq (the numbers from one to five in French) for many English speakers, not to mention this set of numbers being learnt pretty much as a 'chunk' or formulaic utterance by the 8-year-olds telling this joke, and so we are presented with a situation in which our brain is temporarily confused by the words, finds the humour and then has a good old chuckle.

Not all puns are exact homophones, and one of my favourite jokes is this one:

Why are there no aspirins in the jungle?

The parrots eat 'em all!

This pun relies on parrots eat 'em all sounding like paracetamol, but in fact I pronounce paracetamol  the other way, with an e as in bed (something like /ˌpæɹəˈsɛtəmɒl/ for the linguists), and my all is not like the ol syllable. Nevertheless, there are many puns that work because a string of sounds is precisely identical with two different meanings, and yet our brains don't ever confuse them until we are made to by the complicated joke set-up. Similarly, we don't ever seem to get homophonous words mixed up (pen, bank etc., where the words have two or more totally separate meanings). We even manage to think of different lexical categories from the same root as different (analyses is one I use in teaching: it can be the plural of the noun analysis or the 3rd person singular present tense form of the verb analyse). How we store and retrieve these is a question I'm going to let the brain scientists work on. 

Pub crawling

There's a game for various iDevices called The Simpsons: Tapped Out, in which you have to rebuild Springfield. It's good; I'm obsessed. 

Every now and then it gets seasonal updates, and today it got an update for St Patrick's Day, which seems to be a bigger thing in the US than it is in England, where no one particularly cares about it. (I expect they do in Ireland.) Anyway, in the game, to introduce the new storyline, Homer says this: 

Notice that he says 'The day we all pub crawl to celebrate St Patrick', using 'pub crawl' as a verb. This strikes me as ungrammatical. I'm quite fascinated by this because 'pub crawl' must certainly be a British expression, borrowed into US English for the purposes of British-style (or perhaps Irish-style, in this case) pub crawling. It's my impression that in US English, the usual term for a drinking place is a 'bar'. We do use this word in UK English too, but it's not used for the more traditional pub-type places, only for the trendier type of establishment. And of course it is the place in a pub where one is served.

So what of this 'pub crawl' verb then? Well, the origin of the expression is clear: a compound noun was formed from a zero-derivation of the verb 'crawl' plus the thing that is crawled, to indicate an occasion of 'crawling' pubs. Zero-derivation is when you change the category of a word without changing its form, and is fairly common in English for the purpose of verbing nouns and nouning verbs. This noun 'pub crawl', however, seems to have been zero-derived back again into a verb in Homer's idiolect. I don't think compound nouns are very commonly turned into verbs at all in English: we have lots of compound nouns from verbs, like tin-opener, but hardly any verbs ('babysit' is an example, backformed from 'babysitter'). In fact, Homer seems to be particularly fond of them. In my morphology class, I use an example from the Simpsons of a very rare instance of a process called 'noun incorporation', and this is an exactly comparable example, also spoken by Homer:

Did I ever tell you about the time I babyshot my boss?

Here, the instrumental noun 'baby' is incorporated into the verb, giving a complex verb 'babyshoot', meaning 'to shoot someone via one's baby'. What I want to know is who in the Simpsons writing team is putting these verbs into Homer's language? I'm a big fan of their work, whoever they are.

Sweet tooths

I heard an interesting example of how irregular plurals can become regular when they're part of an exocentric compound idiom: sweet tooths.

In case you don't know, the idiom 'to have a sweet tooth' means that you like to eat sweet things. It's not very often used in the plural, because you're usually either saying that you (singular) have one or asking/telling someone else (singular) (if) they have one.

But of course it can be, if for instance you were talking about your two children and saying that they've both got a sweet tooth. You might say it as I just did, or you might say they've got sweet tooths. It sounds a bit weird, but it sounds even weirder to say they've got sweet teeth - the idiomatic meaning is completely lost and it becomes just an odd fact about their teeth.

The same thing happens with Walkman, the personal music player Sony makes (MP3 these days, but used for cassettes, CDs and minidiscs at various times in the past). The plural is notoriously variable. Some people will adhere to the 'man' part and say Walkmen, but most will go for Walkmans.

It's because, as I said, it's both exocentric and idiomatic. Exocentric means that it's not a type of tooth or a type of man - the 'head' of the compound doesn't match what the whole term describes. The opposite would be an endocentric compound like blackbird, which is a type of bird. And idiomatic means that it has a meaning that can't be readily deduced from its parts - so you couldn't predict the meaning if you didn't know it (because it's not a man that walks or a tooth that's sweet - it goes hand in hand with the exocentricity). These two fact together lead to a pretty opaque term, and the irregularity (which tends to erode over time anyway, as evidenced by all the irregular forms we've lost over the centuries) doesn't seem to apply any more, so we apply the default regular plural.