Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Today we're going to talk about a weird kind of noun that breaks a common pattern, and then

about the differences between reading and listening. This first segment is by Karen Lundy. You know what a scarecrow is? You've probably

seen one, or at least a picture of one, standing in a field all straw and old clothes, doing its

job. But have you ever really thought about what its name actually says? Scarecrow has two parts.

It's something that scares plus a crow.

A crow that scares?

No.

A thing that scares crows?

Yes.

But here's where English gets delightfully weird.

The words are arranged in a way that looks backward from what you might expect today.

The crow shows up second in the word, but it's actually the target, not the one doing the scaring.

A scarecrow isn't a crow with a bad attitude. It's the thing meant to scare crows off.

But to see just how rebellious the scarecrow is, you have to compare it to how

we usually smash words together. So let's look at the usual order of things. Think about the word

doghouse. It's a house for a dog. The main word, what linguists call the head of the compound,

is house.

A dog house is fundamentally a type of house.

Or look at apple pie.

It's a pie made with apples.

An apple pie is at its core, pun intended, a pie.

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