Thread by @dtmooreeditor

So there's a particular quirk of English grammar that I've always found quite endearing: the exocentric verb-noun compound agent noun.

It appears in a definite, remarkably narrow period - not more than 150, 200 years - before dying out, leaving loads of legacy words in its wake.

To explain briefly! An agent noun is a noun derived from another word (usually a verb), meaning "someone who [verb]s." e.g.:

"to travel" => "traveller"
"to rule" => "ruler"
"to direct" => "director"

In Middle and Modern English, agent nouns derived from verbs are almost always constructed using the agentive suffix -er (from German), less commonly from -or (from French).

(Agent nouns derived from nouns usually take -eer or -ist, both from French, but I digress.)

The equivalent suffix in Old English is -a:

ridan (to ride) => ridda (rider)
giefan (to give) => giefa, gifa (giver)

It's superficially similar to -er (i.e. modern speakers tend to pronounce both as a shwa ⟨ə⟩), although they're from different roots.

With me so far?

So *compound* agent nouns are agent nouns that narrow the sense by specifying an object for the verb. In Middle & Modern English they're usually formed by putting the agent noun after the object, e.g.

"to fight fire" => "firefighter"
"to say 'nay'" => "naysayer"

And the same is absolutely true in Old English (OE *loves* compound words), as in these two examples from Beowulf:

"giefan bēag" (to give a ring) => "bēah-gifa" (ring-giver, i.e. a wealthy lord)
"webbian friþ" (to weave peace) => "friþwefer" (peaceweaver, i.e. a hostage bride)

But while these words were formed substantially the same way (aside from the shift from the OE -a to the ME -er) for more than a thousand years, there's this odd period where dozens of compound agent nouns flipped the order and lost the suffix.

These "exocentric" verb-noun compound agent nouns *start* with the verb, without the suffix, and end with the object. Some examples:

"to pick pockets" => "pickpocket"
"to spend thrift (i.e. savings)" => "spendthrift"
"to swash (i.e. strike) a buckler" => "swashbuckler"

And almost all these words were coined between 1550 and 1700 -- it's a very rare construction before and after that period.

A lot of these words have *remained* in the language, mostly to baffle and enrage modern speakers, but almost none have been *coined* in three centuries.

But what especially grabs me is how *seedy* these words generally are. Consider the above examples, along with turncoat (traitor), lickspittle (toady), skinflint (miser), turnkey (gaoler), scofflaw (criminal), lackwit (fool), cutthroat (murderer) or sellsword (mercenary).

It seems like, over maybe four or five generations, a whole-ass grammatical word construction appeared, proliferated and died out... and it was used almost wholly for insults and street slang.

And precisely because the sort of people who coin insults and street slang tended not to be the sort of people who write books, we don't really know where that came from or why it was seen in such negative terms.

And I think about far more than I have any business doing. /fin