The other night, trying as usual to fall asleep and failing quite remarkably, my mind turned to word relationships. I like tracing them: I was thrilled, when studying Arabic, to come across the word azraq (the masculine form of the word “blue”): immediately I thought of the English “azure.” The Arabic word for petroleum, napht, called up a memory of Betty McDonald’s book, Anybody Can Do Anything, which recounted how her family kept a large tub of naptha out on the back porch during the Great Depression. From time to time they would dip their dirty coats in it, being unable to afford dry cleaning.
Word relationships in English are equally intriguing: by this I mean interesting combinations or shortcuts that strike me as creative. To illustrate, I’ll cite some of my favorite examples.
Years ago, as he prepared to color my hair red, my stylist told me he was going to richen my hair color. “That’s not a word!” screeched my beady-eyed inner editor, ever ready to pounce on verbal transgressions. “It’s an outrage!” Thinking it over later, however, “richen” seemed a clever combination of the words “deepen” and “enrich.”
A colleague once told me that in attempting to perform a task assigned by her manager, she became extremely flustrated. This seemed a pretty good shortcut for “flustered” and “frustrated.” I can easily imagine such a mental state.
My four-year-old granddaughter, Princess Pink Cheeks, can’t pronounce the word “yellow.” She calls it lello, which evokes thoughts of “lemon” and “jello.” (Her father at the same age pronounced the word as 'ellow.)
We at dailykos of course are familiar with such shortcuts as journo for journalist and wingnuts for right-wing nutjobs. What are YOUR favorite verbal shortcuts? Do you make up your own or merely collect them, as I do?
Come on, join the fun! We might wind up with enough words to compile our own online...dictionary. (No, I am not going to take a shortcut with that word, thank you kindly.)