Or should I spread them apart?

  • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Linguistically speaking, there are three tests that can help us determine whether “buttcheeks” is one word:

    1. The lexical drift test. Note that a “blackboard” doesn’t have to be black - the ones I grew up with were mostly green. Once two words have univerbated that word is then free to drift in meaning from the meaning of its original constituents.

    In this case the lexical drift test is inconclusive - a “buttcheek” is still the cheek of your butt.

    1. The initial stress test. In English specifically, compounding tends to result in a stress shift: “a black BOARD”, but “a BLACKboard”. There are exceptions to this tendency, though, and so it’s not the best metric to rely on.

    Even so, we can note that “BUTTcheek” does pass the initial stress test.

    1. Finally, the best test is the modification test. Only the head of a compound can be modified - “pink toilet paper”, for example, can only refer to pink paper, and cannot mean “paper for a pink toilet”, which lets us know that “toilet paper” is really one word in English, not two.

    “A green buttcheek” does specifically mean “A cheek that is green”, and you could potentially have a butt where only the cheeks are green, but not the entire butt, so “buttcheek” does pass the third test as well.

    In conclusion, “buttcheek” is one word in English. Note that this only describes how this word exists in speaker’s minds, and should not be taken as advice on whether to write “buttcheek” as one word or two.

    Writing is not language, and writing conventions are arbitrary and rarely follow the actual rules of a language, and so linguistics has little to say about whether a prescriptive English teacher would recommend spelling “buttcheek” as one word, with a space, or with a hyphen. But regardless of how you choose to write it, it is demonstrably one word in English for the above reasons.

      • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        Also one word for the same reasons, lol.

        Or was that a proposition? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      “buttcheek” is one word in English.

      This is excellent. It’s the same way that America eroded healthcare so it could subvert it: erode language so one can forget the hyphen and call it “evolution” instead of indolence.

      • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I can’t tell whether you’re serious, but this process of compounding and subsequent univerbation is a universal - literally all languages do it, not just American English.

        If you’re commenting on the prescriptive practice of putting a hyphen between the constituents of compound words, then I’d like to see your argument for doing so with “butt-cheek” but not with the practically identical compound “healthcare” that you just used without a hyphen.

        Also, by your argument it would seem that we should still be spelling “lord” as “lo-rd” and “lady” as “la-dy”, since they originally come from the compounds hlaf-weard “loaf-guardian” and hlaf-dige “loaf-kneader”.

        The real answer, of course, is that all of these orthographic practices are arbitrary and conventional, and have very little to do with the realities of English, whether American or otherwise.