Kennings

[cosmolinguist]

Seeing this link to a tweet made me happy and filled me with chagrin for the same reason: because I had forgotten the word kenning.

Happy because I'd been trying to think of this word the other day and couldn't; chagrin because like the tweeter I love kennings. I learned about them in the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, which loves alliteration and riddles, and kennings are little phrases that are almost like tiny riddles, and often alliterative with surrounding words in the poem. Like calling the sea the "whale-way" or a body a "bone-house."

I think the love for these extends into modern anglophone culture to the extent that we love compound words like this (and we often attribute their existence or our desire for them to "there must be a German word for this" when of course Old English is way more similar to German than present-day English is).

And as the tweet alludes to, there's a fashion for calling snakes "danger noodles" and so on (the example of this that most sticks in my mind is a goth teenager renaming household objects: "Those aren’t Band-Aids, they’re SKIN LIES." "It’s not a freezer, it’s a DINNER SARCOPHAGUS").

Anyway I was trying to think of the word kenning the other day because I wanted to tell you all I'd thought of one. I was doing laundry and I dropped one of those detergent pod things on the floor. I looked at it there and thought oh I dropped a... and even to myself I didn't know what to call it.

My brain finished the thought with ...soap pillow.

I kinda like that. Soap pillow!

Comments

[meepettemu]

I like that :)

[lilysea]

I am so happy that there is a concept of kennings, and a word for it! ^_^

(I saw someone talking about kennings on twitter a few months ago, and it made me ever so happy.)

[cosmolinguist]

They are so cool, one of my favorite features of Old English.

[silveradept]

I think that's an excellent kenning. And a good description of the pods.

[barakta]

One of the positive feedbacks I was given after doing my third needs assessment this week was that I was very good at understanding someone who couldn't find the word for things and would do kennings which I parsed and was able to reply with the official word. I don't consider this an especial skill, I'm accustomed to being a person and being surrounded by people who struggle with words at times and just shove in $NOUN or $META-SYNTACTIC-VARIABLE in its place cos it's still sense making overall...

Kennings... Cool!

[cosmolinguist]

It's definitely a skill, and something I am not surprised you're good at because you don't expect everyone's brains to work in the same way.

[jesse_the_k]

:))))))

[quantumcupcakes]

I love that there's even a word for it, I had no idea. Soap pillow is a good one. I forgot the word pen once and used 'writing stick'

[cosmolinguist]

They're called pods in America, which I learned when there were those "don't eat the Tide [brand name] pods" PSA going around a few months ago because...apparently people wanted to try eating them?

I think they're called tabs here? Which isn't a very good name -- soap pillow does seem better the more I think about it. :)

[meme_6006]

Hello Hollymath

Oh wow that is really neat! There is an book author named Todd Strasser, and I have read some of his books and he does some of that type of writing. I love when they use those expressions in writing.