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Cutthroat verb-nouns

twitter words

David-Antoine Williams writes:

What is the difference between a catch-all and a catch-phrase? Both are compounds formed as Verb+Noun, but in catch-all, the noun is the direct object of the verb, whereas in catch-phrase it is the subject. That is, a catch-all is something that catches all things, whereas a catch-phrase is not something that catches phrases – it is a phrase that catches something. Get it?

Recently there has been some discussion of catch-all type compounds, which Brianne Hughes has named “cutthroat compounds,” after one of the more suggestive of these. Apparently they’re rare, because they violate a general tendency for compounds in English to put the ‘head’ (e.g. phrase) on the right (‘right-headedness’). Compare F. ouvre-bouteille to E. bottle-opener (not open-bottle), which follows the most common English productive pattern, Object-Verb+er. If catch-all had followed the normal pattern, we’d be talking about an all-catcher, as we talk about dog-catchers and wind-catchers.

D-AW went on to write a script that unlurked some cutthroats, searching for verbs with left-headed combinations recorded in the entry. I decided to write a script to try another approach -- look for hyphenated nouns where the first part can a verb and the second a noun.

A WordNet list of 117,953 nouns was reduced to just 3,937 hyphenated words, then further reduced to 916 verb-nouns (i.e. a single hyphen, no spaces) via the Wordnik API, then manually whittled down. Of these potential cutthroats, the following aren't yet on Brianne's list:

  1. be-all
  2. cease-fire
  3. counter-revolution
  4. counter-sabotage
  5. cross-classification
  6. cross-division
  7. cross-eye
  8. cross-purpose
  9. cross-question
  10. cross-stitch
  11. dangle-berry
  12. dash-pot
  13. do-good
  14. drop-leaf
  15. end-all
  16. fuss-budget
  17. knock-knee
  18. make-work
  19. squint-eye
  20. sweep-second

I've been generous with some of these, some might originally be adjective-noun but can also be seen as verb-noun: it can be argued counter-revolutions are things that counters revolutions, cross-questions are things (also questions) that cross other questions (there are more counter- and cross- words like this). Some might just be wrong, but here they are.

Here's the ones it found that are already on Brianne's list:

  1. break-axe
  2. cure-all
  3. do-nothing
  4. drop-seed
  5. know-all
  6. make-peace
  7. rest-harrow
  8. save-all
  9. shove-ha'penny, shove-halfpenny
  10. shut-eye
  11. spend-all

And in case I missed any, the full list of 916 verb-nouns is here alongside the Python script.