Tuesday, April 10, 2012

"A knob or excrescence on anything"

Two pages from the West Somerset Word-Book (note, in particular, def. of "snout"):

Also, irrelevantly: an esp. artichoke-like pangolin (HT Steph Bernhard); cat-fur repurposed as nesting material for great tits:

2 comments:

Elisa said...

What's the linguistic term for when a bundle of letters takes on semantic value? e.g. "sl" indicates slipperiness, "sn" indicates snortiness?

Zed said...

No idea, really, but it sounds like some subgenre of snecdoche.