trailofdesire:

dispatchrabbi:

crime-and-puns:

*sets entire english language on fire*

So this is actually a half-cool half-frustrating phenomenon called a cran morpheme.

Cran morphemes are morphemes that don’t have a meaning outside of the thing they designate. The ur-example, of course, is cranberry. Unlike blueberry (blue + berry), where the first morpheme is somewhat descriptive of the actual berry itself (blueberries are, after all, blueish), the cran- in cranberry doesn’t give you any more help than “this designates the type of berry we call cranberries”. The snozz- of snozzberry is similar.

It is true that cran- comes eventually from “crane” and that cranberries might have been named that because cranes ate them or something, but appealing to this invokes the etymological fallacy. That is, no one who uses or learns the word today thinks of cranes when they talk about cranberries. (Etymologists, lexicographers, and linguists don’t count as native speakers, as usual.)

Even so, the etymology doesn’t help us here, because the word that the cuttle- of cuttlefish comes from just means “cuttlefish” anyway. It’s cuttles all the way down.

The most important question to me is, can I call them cudelefish to emphasize their cuddliness?