Grab Bag for Word Nerds, Part Two: Wait, What? Confusing Compound Words

Most of these words are built from two common terms, and yet their meanings don't necessarily add up to what you'd expect. Even if you recognise and use these terms sometimes, do you know their origins and definitions?
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. aftermath
    the consequences of an event, especially a catastrophic one
    The second clip shows the aftermath of the shooting as police officers secure the scene. Fox News (Oct 14, 2020)
    Aftermath doesn't make sense until you know that math is an archaic word for "mow." So if you think about a field that has been mowed, with all the crops flattened, that's the image the word should conjure.
  2. blackguard
    someone who is morally reprehensible
    From reading them, you'd think that every athlete, coach, or executive is either a saint or a blackguard. Slate (Apr 28, 2014)
    Originally used to refer to soldiers or servants who wore black uniforms, over timeblackguard — as one word, not a two-word phrase — came to mean a criminal, a scoundrel, or a lowlife.
  3. earmark
    give or assign a resource to a particular person or cause
    Either way, it would be a big boost to school funding, with half the money earmarked for teacher raises. Washington Times (Oct 14, 2020)
    If you've ever seen an identification tag in an animal's ear, that's an earmark. In the political world, if a piece of legislation contains money to fund a politician's pet project in their district, that's also known as an earmark, designating a form of ownership over that allocation.
  4. hogwash
    nonsensical or ridiculous speech or writing
    All Trump is offering for his part are hogwash and snake oil. Los Angeles Times (Oct 13, 2020)
    Hogwash originally referred to kitchen scraps and leftovers, especially liquids, that were fed to pigs. Because this mixture was one notch above actual garbage, the term was later used to describe nonsense or outright lies.
  5. honeymoon
    a holiday taken by a newly married couple
    Biden’s honeymoon, particularly if Democrats secure House and Senate majorities and jam through an ambitious agenda, would be history by this time next year. Washington Post (Sep 24, 2020)
    A moon is an outdated way of referring to a month, since one full cycle of the moon's phases takes 28 days. So a honeymoon is the sweet first month after a marriage.
  6. jackpot
    the cumulative amount involved in a game (such as poker)
    A marquee dangled the possibility of a $250,000 jackpot and a facsimile of a giant guitar on the side of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Biloxi. Washington Post (Sep 14, 2020)
    In nineteenth-century America, one form of poker required a player to hold a hand containing a pair of jacks or higher in order to begin betting. The pot, the pile of money or chips in the middle of the table, was only winnable with jacks or better: a jackpot.
  7. piecemeal
    one thing at a time
    The county, so far, is not inclined to open schools in a piecemeal fashion. Los Angeles Times (Oct 13, 2020)
    In Old English, -meal was a suffix used to make compound adverbs. Its only surviving use in modern English is piecemeal: to do or receive something in small, separate steps rather than all at once. Obsolete siblings of this orphaned word include parcelmeal, pennymeal, lumpmeal, and cupmeal.
  8. scapegoat
    someone who is punished for the errors of others
    Why People Believe It: People want a scapegoat for the immense suffering and economic fallout caused by COVID-19, and China—a foreign country and a competitor of the U.S.—is an easy target. Scientific American (Oct 12, 2020)
    Scapegoat was coined by mistake, in a 1530 mistranslation of the name azazel in the book of Leviticus. The idea was that one goat was sacrificed to God, and another was set free after having the sins of the community symbolically laid upon it so it could carry them away.
  9. slapstick
    a type of comedy characterized by pranks and physical humor
    Pantos — a raucous blend of fairy-tale plots, topical references, slapstick, song, dance and innuendo — are as much a part of the British holiday season as turkey and presents. Seattle Times (Sep 30, 2020)
    Around the turn of the twentieth century, when comic plays or stage routines showed scenes of fighting, someone offstage would whack two flat pieces of wood — joined at one end like tweezers — together, making a loud noise. The genre of broad comedy involving lots of pratfalls, collisions, and comic combat took its name from these slapsticks.
  10. wedlock
    the state of being a married couple voluntarily joined
    Billed as “China’s first open topic park integrating culture, arts and recreation aimed to exhibit the ‘Ordos Marriage,’ ” it is a sprawling network of sculpture gardens devoted to the themes of romance and wedlock. New York Times (Mar 6, 2015)
    A wedding is a bond, so wedlock is the condition of being joined together in marriage.
Created on Fri Sep 18 11:51:43 EDT 2020 (updated Fri Oct 23 10:14:41 EDT 2020)

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