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cosmolinguistSeeing 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!
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!