Page 28 - The Language of Humour

‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’ 15
meaning ‘state’ in the first case, but a free morpheme meaning
‘covering for the head’ in the second. Or words like ‘slowish’ where ‘-
ish’ is a suffix indicating the sense of ‘slightly’, yet ‘-ish’ is not a suffix
in the word ‘establish’. This potential confusion creates the following
joke:

‘What’s a baby pig called?’
‘A piglet’
‘So what’s a baby toy called?’
‘A toilet’

‘-let’ can often be a suffix meaning small. Sometimes it occurs just as
the final syllable in a word. In this case the French word ‘toilette’ is the
diminutive of ‘toile’, the word for ‘cloth’, not ‘toy’.
The following witty definition is based partly on a phonological
similarity between the prefix ‘mis-’ and the word ‘miss’; a prefix is
interpreted as a free morpheme in a compound word.

MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)

Compound words are formed from two free morphemes. The order is
significant; they can’t be reversed without altering the meaning: for
example an ‘overpass’ is not the same as ‘Passover’.

I should have been a country-western singer. After all, I’m older
than most western countries. (George Burns)

The meaning is also difficult to explain simply by referring to the
constituent parts.

Have you heard the one about the man who bought a paper shop?
It blew away.

‘Paper shop’ can mean either ‘shop made out of papers’ or ‘shop that
sells papers’. Logically, you might expect the meaning of ‘overtake’ and
‘undertake’ to be related opposites, yet their meanings are not
connected.

He used to overtake too often and now he’s with the undertaker.