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Topic: Why is it "killjoy" and not "joykill"?

Anonymous 47ae211000a6a8.34833955 started this discussion 2 months (2008-05-21 18:24:12 UTC) ago:

Same thing as with "scarecrow". Makes no sense.

Anonymous 48347de334ed86.26029980 replied with this 2 months (2008-05-21 20:06:34 UTC) ago, 2 hours later (#18,923):

killjoy sounds better.

Anonymous 4833c7af60be86.05503821 replied with this 1 month (2008-05-22 08:52:49 UTC) ago, 13 hours later (#19,048):

try putting a definite article (grammar? WTF?) between the two words and you will see that it makes more sense. For example:

killjoy Kill (the) joy. Someone who brings everyone down for one reason or another. Often applied to people in authority over us who seem to delight in denying us our fun.

If you reverse it: Joy (the) kill, well it doesn't quite work out as well.

To have the same basic meaning you would need to put the suffix -er on the end as in: Joy Killer.

Scarecrow works the same way: Scare (the) crow. If you reverse it: Crow (the) scare… it just doesn't make sense.

Here we do not have an option to use the -er suffix. Crowscarer might be a good band name but it jut doesn't work for anything else.

Hope ya learned something!

Anonymous 4828e40fa7de87.60247160 replied with this 1 month (2008-05-22 08:54:41 UTC) ago, 2 minutes later (#19,049):

@19,048

+10 internets to you. I got the scarecrow thing, but I assumed killjoy was just because it sounded cool.

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