Spears/peckers

[Grant Barrett]

On Jan 16, 2007, at 00:25, Wilson Gray wrote:

> BTW, in what sense is "whickerbill" parallel to "peckerwood"? Is it a
> dialect form whose standard form is "billwhicker," with the sole
> meaning, "a kind of bird"?

Inversion of a compound isn't part of the similarity, it's the shared
meanings, though note that as Doug Wilson pointed out, there's not a
real bird called a "whickerbill."

Grant Barrett
Double-Tongued Dictionary
http://www.doubletongued.org/
editor at doubletongued.org

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