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Caution! Merge Ahead: How two words become one. "It's inevitable that 'healthcare' will eventually become one word everywhere. The same is happening with 'day care,' which is already rendered as 'daycare.'"
Good article. Perlman jokes that he hopes we won't end up with merged monstrosities like "incometax," though I would argue that income tax already is a monstrosity. In general, I like when words merge. I'm very forward-looking (not forwardlooking). For example, I was writing "email" rather than the clunky "e-mail" years before it became more acceptable.
Perhaps it is too obvious to state, but the driving factor in fusing two words seems to be when a significant semantic shift has been established. "Health care" no longer means simply caring for health, but refers to an industry around heath. "I manage my own heath care without the involvement of healthcare."
A second factor is that the original meaning of the separate words is still significant and common.
As soon as these conditions exist, it becomes difficult to avoid fusing the words together when the shifted meaning is intended.
However, there are many two-word expressions that show no sign of fusing. The "monstrosities" in reference in the article have no cause to fuse, since *"hamburgerbun" would mean nothing but a bun for a hamburger, and *"incometax," nothing more than tax on income. But, unlike "hamburger bun," "pork barrel" could easily fuse (and I see tens of thousands of examples using online search engines). What might save "pork barrel" is that we simply don't have that much cause to refer to actual pork barrels.
Didn't the current swine flu virus originally come out of a pork barrel? More (or less) seriously, Wiki provides a cute usage example of pork barrel: “In his 1845 novel The Chainbearer, James Fenimore Cooper wrote 'I hold a family to be in a desperate way, when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel.'â€
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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