foot + ball = football
a general election and a major sporting championship, but here am I still thinking about words
When it was the week of the general election, I was, I promise, thinking deeply about democracy, world crises, and local issues. But I was also, I’ll admit, thinking quite a bit about the ‘pencils on a bit of string’ provided in the ballot booths.
The one in the booth I used was blunt, and I instinctively reached for my Muji pencil sharpener that I carry with me at all times (I have about seven of them, one for every bag/pocket/pencil case), but then I stopped because – is it against the rules to sharpen the pencil? Not wanting to get arrested by the election police, I marked an unhappily chunky, too-soft cross on the paper (actually two crosses because we had a local ward election too) and then went home to read up on the pencil rules.
While googling, I skim-read the Electoral Commission’s Handbook for polling station staff which says that staff should “check that pencils/pens are fixed securely to polling booths, and that pencils are sharpened”. Will this be the reason I’ll be writing (with a very sharp email pencil) to my new MP? No. But all the pencil thoughts did lead me along a nice word-nerd path:
First, I learnt that the word ferrule (the term for the metal bit at the end of a pencil) comes from the Latin 'ferrum' (meaning iron) and the English-via-Latin-and-old-French 'verrel' (meaning bracelet). Thus, ferrule means 'iron bracelet' which is a perfect description for it!
The ‘say what you see’ etymology of ferrule made me think of this lovely thought from Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things:
When the twins asked what cuff-links were for — “To link cuffs together,” Ammu told them — they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = cuff-link. This, to them, rivalled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.
This quote has stayed with me since I read the book in school, and whenever I see a good compound word I think of it. Jellyfish, for example, bumblebee, newspaper, pancake, and, appropriately for tonight, football. Aren’t those all perfect in the cufflink way? Popcorn is a great one, too. It’s corn, it pops = popcorn. Perfect.
I also think of it when I see two words that are currently separate but, in my opinion, should get cosier. These are known as open compound words. Ice cream, ice cube … I’m blanking on thinking of any that aren’t to do with ice.
The other day a friend messaged with a ‘saw this and thought of you’: he’d been doing some DIY and needed a bit of metal to go over the edge of a step and found out it’s called a stair nose. The nose of a stair, a stair nose. How great is that!
The lovely thing about language is we can change it – you can decide when to mash two words together to make one (perhaps with a hyphen to start with, like they’re holding hands, and then into one as they become inseparable). Carpark has just about got there now from car park, for example.
And so, as a fan of word lists, I’m going to start a new log of my favourite compound words (whether hyphenated, open, or closed). Feel free to comment with your submissions!
I love writing by hand and especially in pencil. I am a late adopter of Blackwing but puzzled by the design of the eraser - so much appears inaccessible within the ferrule. Am I missing something?
Very much enjoying reading your posts, so much delicious language.