0

Possible Duplicate:
Is there a term for words that have a single meaning or are only used in a single context?

I want to find some English phrases whose individual words are seldom used outside of that phrase. That way its words show up in the phrase alone, but nowhere else.

Community
  • 1
Richard
  • 109
  • 1
    http://ask.metafilter.com/154021/Obscure-words-combine-to-form-common-phrase – Armen Ծիրունյան Nov 22 '12 at 21:47
  • That seems a reasonable list. The question is off-topic here. – Andrew Leach Nov 22 '12 at 21:53
  • @AndrewLeach That list does have a lot of false positives, meaning that it claims words are unique to those phrases which in fact are not. In fact, apart from perhaps fro, the rest are hardly unknown in outside contexts. – tchrist Nov 22 '12 at 22:07
  • 1
    Yes, but there is a reasonable list there, with some more below that. Any word can be used on its own, so the question is likely to be unanswerable; although I could be fairly confident petard is very rarely found without some form of hoist. – Andrew Leach Nov 22 '12 at 22:14
  • They're called stormy petrels and there's a long list. – Mitch Nov 22 '12 at 22:45
  • I'm more used to the term cranberry expression. There's an article with a good analysis at http://homepage.univie.ac.at/beata.trawinski/presentations/lrec-mwe_08.pdf . Also, at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/123195596/Fixed-Expressions-and-Idioms-in-English-A-Corpus-Based-Approach , Moon deals with 'cranberry collocations' as a subset of 'fixed expressions and [sic] idioms' (section 5.1.3) . Note, however, that a cranberry word (like cranberry) is usually taken to be a 'false compound', which, unlike 'teapot', could not have been formed from a combination of two words (no word 'cran'). – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '12 at 23:25
  • @AndrewLeach I disagree: words like trials, tribulations, cease, desist, wreak, havoc, moot, plethora and most of the others all enjoy a perfectly healthy solitary existence. – tchrist Nov 23 '12 at 00:12
  • @Mitch Again, even that isn't quite right. For example, certainly there can and have been delphic pronouncements without mentioning augury or oracles. – tchrist Nov 23 '12 at 00:15
  • @tchrist: What else than havoc is ever being wreaked nowadays? – SF. Nov 23 '12 at 00:22
  • @SF. Ruin, for one. And havoc also gets cried. – tchrist Nov 23 '12 at 02:04
  • @tchrist: Are you disagreeing with my suggestion of 'stormy petrel' or with one example in that list? – Mitch Nov 23 '12 at 02:14
  • @tchrist: roughly 1:2000 frequency ratio in ngram, Google has a total of 180 unique results for "wreak ruin", but I concede. This is a valid option. – SF. Nov 23 '12 at 09:18
  • We could argue about any of the suggestions in that list, but part of that argument is semantics – how "seldom" is "seldom used"? At any rate, any of the phrases in the list can be checked using Ngrams, such as this one for (wreak) havoc and this one for (moral) turpitude. Whether or not a given candidate "passes" the test would be subjective. – J.R. Nov 23 '12 at 11:01

1 Answers1

0

How about "to boot," in the sense of "in addition" in occasionally used phrases like "... and I'll throw this in to boot?" In American English the only other use of the word, which is an Anglo Saxon word meaning profit or advantage, not the French word for shoe, is in reference to an additional amount needed to complete a tax free exchange of real property.

Ichabod
  • 1