A Quakebuttock, a Praisegravy, and a Killpriest Walk Into a Bar ...

The breakneck, daredevil, swashbuckling world of Cutthroat Compounds.

N.B. There is a cryptic puzzle at the end of this article. If you’re new to cryptics or want to brush up, my quick cryptic crosswords crash course begins here.

What do you call someone whose vices include being a cutpurse, a pickpocket, a skinflint, a tattletale, a fussbudget and, more generally, a do-nothing, lackluster scofflaw and scapegrace? Well, I’d argue we’ve already called this person enough names, but what’s interesting is that each of these little bits of slander is a surprisingly rare and rather wonderful type of word known to linguists as “agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds” — and to people who prefer things to have nice names as “Cutthroat Compounds.”

There are only about 30 Cutthroat Compounds (“Cutthroat” for short) used in common English, but the originator of the term — a historical linguist named Brianne Hughes — has collected more than a thousand rather wonderful rarities that have fallen out of (or never made it into) common usage. 

Cutthroats are compounds created by a verb followed by the noun that is its object to describe a person or a thing based on what they do, and according to Hughes, they’re very useful for children learning language because they mirror the word order you’d use to put them in a sentence — one cuts a throat (hopefully only if seriously provoked) and not the other way round. But for various reasons, that’s not the way we normally form such compounds in English — so-called “Backstabber” compounds like weedkiller, book-lover, and shoemaker reverse the order of the object and the verb, and they’re vastly more common, even if they’re an order of magnitude less fun to say than killweed, lovebook, and makeshoe would be. 

The subtly different ways these compounds can convey meaning was neatly illustrated to me by the discovery in Hughes’ list of rare Cutthroats that the Monkey Puzzle tree was at one point called a puzzle-monkey, which led me much more intuitively to understand the origin of the odd name: It’s a tree whose labyrinthine branches would puzzle a monkey set on climbing them. 

Hughes is not the first to become enthralled by the magic of these funny little constructions — the American humorist James Thurber had a habit of inventing what he called “bedwords” to combat insomnia. His bedwords tended to follow the Cutthroat pattern, and he detailed a number of them (with the added difficulty that they must each contain the sequential letters SGRA — Thurber was a committed insomniac) in a 1951 article for The New Yorker. A few standouts:

Kissgranny. 1. A man who seeks the company of older women, especially older women with money; a designing fellow, a fortune hunter. 2. An overaffectionate old woman, a hugmoppet, a bunnytalker.

Tossgravel. 1. A male human being who tosses gravel, usually at night, at the window of a female human being’s bedroom, usually that of a young virgin; hence, a lover, a male sweetheart, and an eloper. 2. One who is suspected by the father of a daughter of planning an elopement with her, a grablass. 

Fussgrape. 1. One who diets or toys with his food, a light eater, a person without appetite, a scornmuffin, a shuncabbage. 2. A man, usually American, who boasts of his knowledge of wines, a smugbottle. 

As rare as they are in common speech, Cutthroats often find an opportunity to show off their stuff in surnames, especially allegorical ones in fiction. Dr. Dolittle has a Cutthroat surname, as do Luna Lovegood, Dudley Do-Right, and, less fictionally, William Shakespeare. 

With Shakespeare himself on their side, Cutthroats are clearly punching (or swashbuckling) above their weight, and only a lack-latin harshmellow of the very worst kind would deny them their well-earned place in the English language. 

I have made you a puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click! 

Folks who’ve been doing the puzzles will notice that I’m using a new site to host this one – it allows me to upload annotated solutions directly to the page instead of posting annotations in a separate newsletter as I’ve been doing up to now. It also has an “anagram helper” tool for solvers, which I often find very helpful. Would love feedback on whether this is a better experience!