Why Is a Hamburger Not Made of Ham? Somebody Guessed and the Guess Stuck

A word that is unfamiliar, foreign or no longer analysable gives speakers nothing to hold on to, and the natural response is to hear it as something recognisable. That reshaping can change the pronunciation, the spelling or both, and it produces a word whose parts appear to explain its meaning even though the explanation is historically wrong. The process is unconscious rather than an error anybody notices making, and once enough speakers have done it the reshaped form becomes the correct one, since that is how words work.

Several are quoted in every account and each shows a different mechanism:

• •A crayfish, from a French word for a crab, reshaped around fish
• •A sparrowgrass, an older folk form of asparagus, now receded
• •A bridegroom, from an older word for a man, reshaped around groom
• •A hangnail, from an older word meaning a painful spike, not hanging
• •A cockroach, from a Spanish word, split into two English ones
• •A hamburger, named for a city, then split to give burger as a unit

The most interesting consequence is that a reanalysed word can donate a piece to the language that never existed before, which is how several productive endings arose. A word named after a German city was heard as containing a meaningful second element, which was then detached and attached to anything else, producing a very large family of terms. The same happened with a suffix extracted from a word for a scandal, which is now attached to any political embarrassment. Another was extracted from a word for alcoholic and now marks obsession with anything. In each case the original word had no such part and the language now does.

A related process runs in the opposite direction and is worth separating. Where the reshaping described here makes a word look more meaningful, back formation takes a word that appears to contain a suffix and removes it to produce a shorter word that never existed, so editing was formed from editor and burgling from burglar rather than the reverse. A further variant splits a word at the wrong point over time, so a word beginning with n lost its letter to the preceding article or gained one from it, which is how an apron and a newt both arrived at their current forms from the opposite starting points.

The instinct to treat these as errors misunderstands what a word is, and the point is worth making plainly. A word means what speakers use it to mean, and its history has no authority over its present form, so a reshaped word that everybody uses is simply the word. The reshaping also does real work, since it makes vocabulary learnable by connecting unfamiliar items to familiar patterns, which is exactly what a speaker acquiring a language needs. Complaining about the result is complaining about the mechanism by which languages absorb foreign material at all, and every language does it constantly.

Speakers reshape unanalysable words into familiar pieces that appear to explain the meaning, and the reshaped form becomes standard once enough people use it, which is how a word for a crab acquired a fish and a word for a man acquired a groom. The process can detach a piece that never existed and make it productive. The history of a word has no authority over its present form.