Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Scarecrows and other 'cutthroat' compounds. Reading versus listening. Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

Episode Summary

1154. This week, we look at "headless" nouns like "scarecrow," "pickpocket," and "breakfast." We look at why these "cutthroat compounds" break the normal rules of English grammar. Then, we look at the science of reading versus listening, including how our brains process text differently from audio and why multitasking can affect your comprehension.

Episode Notes

1154. This week, we look at "headless" nouns like "scarecrow," "pickpocket," and "breakfast." We look at why these "cutthroat compounds" break the normal rules of English grammar. Then, we look at the science of reading versus listening, including how our brains process text differently from audio and why multitasking can affect your comprehension.

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Episode Transcription

Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about a weird kind of noun that breaks a common pattern and then about the difference between reading and listening.

This first segment is by Karen Lunde.

Compound Agent Nouns

by Karen Lunde

You know what a scarecrow is. You've probably seen one, or at least a picture of one, standing in a field, all straw and old clothes, doing its job. But have you ever really thought about what its name actually says?

"Scarecrow" has two parts: it's something that scares, plus a crow. A crow that scares? No. A thing that scares crows? Yes.

But here's where English gets delightfully weird — the words are arranged in a way that looks “backward” from what you might expect today. The crow shows up second in the word, but it’s actually the target, not the one doing the scaring. A scarecrow isn’t a crow with a bad attitude — it’s the thing meant to scare crows off.

But to see just how rebellious the scarecrow is, you have to compare it to how we usually smash words together.

So, let's look at the usual order of things. Think about the word “doghouse.” It’s a house for a dog. The main word — what linguists call the “head” of the compound — is “house.” A doghouse is, fundamentally, a type of house. Or look at “apple pie.” It’s a pie made with apples. An apple pie is, at its core (pun intended!), a pie.

Linguists call these endocentric compounds. “Endo” means “inside,” and that's the key. It means the core identity of the object — what linguists call the “head” — is sitting right there in the word. Is a doghouse a type of house? Yes. Is an apple pie a type of pie? Yes. The word tells you exactly what it is.

But “scarecrow” breaks this rule. A scarecrow isn't a type of crow. It’s a bundle of straw shaped like a person. The “head” of the word — the thing it actually is — isn’t in the word at all. The word describes what the object does, not what it is.

These rebels are called exocentric compounds. “Exo” means outside — think of an exoskeleton. The meaning of the word is “outside” the word itself.

Once you start noticing this pattern, you’ll see it everywhere. But to further appreciate how weird these words are, we also have to look at the "normal" way we name "doers" in English.

In standard English, if you want to name someone who performs an action, the formula is predictable: you take the verb and add the suffix "-er."

If you bake, you're a baker. If you run, you're a runner. If you teach, you're a teacher. This gives us what are called "agent nouns" — words for the agent, or the person doing the action.

We can make these even more specific by adding a noun to the front to create a compound.

For example, if you drive a truck, you aren’t just a driver; you’re a truck driver. If you wash dishes, you’re a dishwasher. Even though these words are longer, they still follow the rules. A truck driver is still a type of driver. A dishwasher is still a type of washer. The grammatical “head” is right there at the end of the word, anchoring the meaning.

But this is where the exocentric rebels come in and flip the table.

Imagine a person who picks pockets. If we followed the normal rules, we would call them a pocket picker. And sometimes we do! But the much more common, much older word is "pickpocket."

Notice the difference? We dropped the "-er." We just smashed the verb ("pick") and the object ("pocket") together: pickpocket.

A pickpocket isn’t a type of pocket. It’s a person who picks pockets. For some other examples, a cutthroat isn’t a type of throat. It’s a person who cuts throats. (Hopefully only metaphorically.) A turncoat isn’t a type of coat. It’s a person who turns their coat, a metaphor for changing allegiances.

These words almost always follow that specific formula: verb + object. 

And if you think those examples sound a little violent or negative, you aren’t imagining things. These words have a fascinating, slightly dark history.

Linguist Brianne Hughes calls these “cutthroat compounds,” which is a perfect name because so many of them describe people doing bad things.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this verb + object structure was a popular way to insult people. If you wanted to mock someone, you described them by their worst habit.

Someone who spoiled your fun was a spoilsport. Someone who killed your joy was a killjoy. Someone who wasted their money was a spendthrift.

Actually, let’s take a quick side note on “spendthrift.” That one confuses people often enough that I talked about it in episode 1122. We usually think of “thrifty” as meaning you save money, but a “spendthrift” is actually someone who wastes it. Originally, the noun "thrift" didn't mean "frugal"; it referred to wealth and prosperity. So, a "spendthrift" is someone who literally spends their "thrift."

Interestingly, many of these insults, including “cutthroat” itself, parallel French verb–object formations. The French language has always loved this structure. For example, the French word for a dangerous place was coupe-gorge, which literally translates to “cuts-throat.” English speakers heard it, translated it, and the word “cutthroat” was born.

Now, you might be thinking these are just old-fashioned insults found in Shakespearean plays or pirate movies. But once you start looking, you’ll see these “headless” words hiding in plain sight.

Take breakfast. It’s not a type of fast; it’s a meal that breaks the fast. Even a massive battleship known as a dreadnought follows this pattern. It’s a ship that dreads nought — "nought" being an old word for nothing. It fears nothing.

And that brings us back to where we started: the scarecrow.

The word “scarecrow” showed up in English around the 1550s. But here is a fun fact you can use to impress your friends: it didn’t originally refer to a straw man in a cornfield. Originally, a scarecrow was a real person.

Farmers would hire an actual person to stand in the fields and shoo the birds away, and that person was called a scarecrow — the crow scarer. It was a job title. It was only later, when farmers started replacing people with stuffed effigies, that the name transferred to the straw man.

So, the next time you eat breakfast or spot a scarecrow in a field, give a little nod to the grammar. You’re using an exocentric compound — a word where the meaning lives outside the letters.

That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.

This next segment was written by Stephanie N. Del Tufo, an assistant professor of education and human development at the University of Delaware.

Reading Versus Listening

by Stephanie N. Del Tufo

Sebastian L., a 15-year old from Skanderborg, Denmark, asks, “Do we need to read, or can we just get everything through audio, like podcasts and audiobooks?” 

Well, let’s start with a thought experiment: Close your eyes and imagine what the future might look like in a few hundred years.

Are people intergalactic travelers zooming between galaxies? Maybe we live on spaceships, underwater worlds or planets with purple skies.

Now, picture your bedroom as a teenager of the future. There’s probably a glowing screen on the wall. And when you look out the window, maybe you see Saturn’s rings, Neptune’s blue glow or the wonders of the ocean floor.

Now ask yourself: Is there a book in the room?

Open your eyes. Chances are, there’s a book nearby. Maybe it’s on your nightstand or shoved under your bed. Some people have only one; others have many.

You’ll still find books today, even in a world filled with podcasts. So why is that? If we can listen to almost anything, why does reading still matter?

As a language scientist, I study how biological factors and social experiences shape language. My work explores how the brain processes spoken and written language, using tools like MRI and EEG.

Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities aren’t exactly alike. Each supports comprehension in different ways. Listening doesn’t provide all the benefits of reading, and reading doesn’t offer everything listening does. Both are important, but they're not interchangeable.

Different brain processes

Your brain uses some of the same language and cognitive systems for both reading and listening, but it also performs different functions depending on how you’re taking in the information.

When you read, your brain is working hard behind the scenes. It recognizes the shapes of letters, matches them to speech sounds, connects those sounds to meaning, then links those meanings across words, sentences and even whole books. The text uses visual structure such as punctuation marks, paragraph breaks or bolded words to guide understanding. You can go at your own speed.

Listening, on the other hand, requires your brain to work at the pace of the speaker. Because spoken language is fleeting, listeners must rely on cognitive processes, including memory to hold onto what they just heard.

Speech is also a continuous stream, not neatly separated words. When someone speaks, the sounds blend together in a process called coarticulation. This requires the listener’s brain to quickly identify word boundaries and connect sounds to meanings. Beyond identifying the words themselves, the listener’s brain must also pay attention to tone, speaker identity and context to understand the speaker’s meaning.

‘Easier’ is relative – and contextual

Many people assume that listening is easier than reading, but this is not usually the case. Research shows that listening can be harder than reading, especially when the material is complex or unfamiliar.

Listening and reading comprehension are more similar for simple narratives, like fictional stories, than for nonfiction books or essays that explain facts, ideas or how things work. My research shows that genre affects how you read. In fact, different kinds of texts rely on specialized brain networks. Fictional stories engage regions of the brain involved in social understanding and storytelling. Nonfiction texts, on the other hand, rely on a brain network that helps with strategic thinking and goal-directed attention.

Reading difficult material tends to be easier than listening from a practical standpoint, as well. Reading lets you move around within the text easily, rereading particular sections if you’re struggling to understand, or underlining important points to revisit later. A listener who is having trouble following a particular point must pause and rewind, which is less precise than scanning a page and can interrupt the flow of listening, impeding understanding.

Even so, for some people, like those with developmental dyslexia, listening may be easier. Individuals with developmental dyslexia often struggle to apply their knowledge of written language to correctly pronounce written words, a process known as decoding. Listening allows the brain to extract meaning without the difficult process of decoding.

Engaging with the material

One last thing to consider is engagement. In this context, engagement refers to being mentally present, actively focusing, processing information and connecting ideas to what you already know.

People often listen while doing other things, like exercising, cooking or browsing the internet – activities that would be hard to do while reading. When researchers asked college students to either read or listen to a podcast on their own time, students who read the material performed significantly better on a quiz than those who listened. Many of the students who listened reported multitasking, such as clicking around on their computers while the podcast played. This is particularly important, as paying attention appears to be more important for listening comprehension than reading comprehension.

So, yes, reading still matters, even when listening is an option. Each activity offers something different, and they are not interchangeable.

The best way to learn is not by treating books and audio recordings as the same but by knowing how each works and using both to better understand the world.

That segment was written by Stephanie N. Del Tufo, an assistant professor of education and human development at the University of Delaware. It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.

Familect

Finally, I have a familect story:

Well, the story goes that every time my father-in-law drove through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Squirrel Hill Tunnel, he complained to his family passengers that too many drivers got spooked by driving through it, thus slowing down and sometimes causing accidents. Years later, my husband began sharing and resharing his dad's comment during our own family drives through that tunnel. It didn't take long for us to interrupt his wisdom with a bit of an eye roll, a warm smile, and a hearty “Squirrel Hill Tunnel.” For many years, whenever a family member repeats themselves, they'll be treated with the same response. And side note, even my siblings and my adult child's friend groups are in on this gag.

Thanks! This reminded me that we actually have a somewhat similar familect about the "Renton S-curves." Traffic slows down there near where I grew up for seemingly no reason, so when we encounter traffic that seems to come out of nowhere and then miraculously clear up, we often say, "Renton S-curves." Some roads are just like that. Thanks for the story!

Finally, thanks to all our Grammarpaloozians, I love that more people seem to be finding us now that we're on Patreon, and I love sending out the little tips and crossword puzzles every week. Your support means the world to me and is a huge help. If you want to join us, visit Patreon.com/grammargirl. 

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Rebekah Sebastian, Nat Hoopes, Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings; and Dan Feierabend in audio whose favorite article of clothing is hooded sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off.

And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. 

That's all. Thanks for listening.Â