These Common Words Are the Result of a Hilarious Misunderstanding

I’m calling them “Splittybits.” Arrest me if you want to.

I read somewhere that a good way to get more attention for a piece here is to start a beef with someone who’s more established in the same field, so I’d like to open this one by firing off a few potshots at the 19th century Danish linguist Jens Otto Harry Jespersen. I hope one of the hospitals in the Central Jutland Region of Denmark has a top-shelf Burn Center, Otto, because you’re about to get scorched.

My primary gripe with Jespersen has to do with his habit of coining fancy words for the linguistic phenomena he unearthed, such as prosiopesis, for the tendency to omit the first sound in a word or phrase, as in “’Morning” for “Good Morning.” It’s thanks to old Otto that we’re stuck with the blisteringly dull word metanalysis for the extremely fun process that gives us real-ass words out of hilarious misunderstandings. As Otto puts it (in “A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles”):

I have ventured to coin the word ‘metanalysis’ for the phenomenon frequent in all languages that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word…