Today we'll focus on compound words. Our correspondent noted that while it's relatively easy to think of nouns composed of a noun plus a verb in its agentival form (screwdriver for example, and skyscraper), it isn't nearly as easy to come up with compound nouns in the reverse order—that is, created by a verb followed by its direct object. Daredevil comes to mind, and so does killjoy, but what else? Scarecrow works but pinchpenny doesn't, since pinchpenny is an adjective, not a noun. Rotgut is good, but hangnail isn't: although you might assume that was created by pairing "hang" with the "nail" from which the loose skin hangs, in fact hangnail has a linguistic ancestor in agnail, meaning "a sore or inflammation about a fingernail or toenail."

whippersnapper?
(though I'm not quite sure what the "whipper" or "snapper" are supposed to be on their own!)

lightbulb?

jumpseat? ...or was that rumbleseat?
Oh my!

What about Lewis Carroll's "portmanteau" words? In "Alice Through The Looking-Glass" his Humpty Dumpty tells Alice about such words as "chortle", "galumphing", "frumious" and "burble" as he narrates the nonsense classic "Jabberwocky". "Frumious" is a combination of "fuming" and "furious", for example. Chortle and galumphing we still use today. tjoeb};>