(Wonderful Word of the Week number one)
A word which everyone who likes words should know.
Morpheme {n.} A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.
Fascinating. And meaningful.
While it may sound like a hefty pain-killer, a morpheme is so very technically linguistic. It brings me right back to my battles with grammar.
Considering those battles were long, drawn out and painful, it is very brave of me to choose something like this to include in my vocabulary.
One quick Google search later reveals to me that that a morpheme is actually very boring.
The tiniest unit of expression in any language. It can be a word, or it can make up a word.
Basic, basic, basic. Like the logs in our wood fire, or the bricks in the base of the Statue of Liberty, or the potatoes on a plate with filet mignon, or... you get the picture. A bit blah and boring, but very necessary.
It's so blah that I think I broke my favourite quotations-finder-website when I searched for a quote - any quote! - containing the word 'morpheme'. Whoops. It told me to try a more general word...
Scratch that, let's move on to something a little more unorthodox.
A2Z Word Finder!
A morpheme may not be dividable into smaller meaningful parts, but I am about break the rules of grammar, or linguistics, or whatever we are dealing with here.
*evil laughter*
Behold, the word morpheme is being broken into smaller morphemes.
Hmm, let's see, there is hemp, rheme, home, hope, moper, hop, heme, memo, hero, mope, perm, poem, prom, romp, here, mop, her, hoe, more, peer, pore, and rope.
Whew!
Now, look out world! I'm armed and ready to point out your morphemes with my morphemes!
(Confession: I really think that I still don't fully grasp the definition of this word about words.)
I thought I liked words...but after learning about that one?
ReplyDelete...maybe not.