Transcript:
What the heck is with the “-er” suffix?
“I’m a witcher.”
“What does a witcher do?”
“I create watch catch breed f*** hunt witches.”
“I’m a birder.”
“What does a birder do?”
“I create catch hunt breed f*** watch birds.”
“Actually I think several of those could apply…”
I think the confusing-ass formula is this:
A [word1]er is a [word2]er of [word1]s.
Witcher is a silly thing to use as your first example, it’s a made up word for a translated book. I can’t think of another word that behaves like that. Making a mountain of a made up molehill. A Molehiller, I would call you.
So a mother is someone who watches moths?
Geralt of rivia is a witcher who fucks witches
Isn’t witcher just a word that was made up for (the English translation of) the Witcher series?
yes, the word wiedźmin was also made up so why not
So what’s a “fucker”?
A fucker of fucks, clearly.
It’s a contraction where the second word is dropped, because what else would you do with them?
Centuries go by, and sometimes it’s no longer the most obvious. But the contraction has already been accepted
It’s definitely not a contraction.
-er is the agent suffix in English. Effectively it turns words into those who do something related to that word.
Hawk > Hawker = One who “hawks” Run > Runner = One who “runs”
In principle this implies the existance of a verbal form of the root word, such as the two above examples.
Witcher, as used by the fantasy series, is a weird one because it’s actually not related to the agent suffix.
The Polish title of The Witcher is Wiedźma which just means “witch”. When it was translated to English they adopted “witcher” as a masculine form to the oft feminine “witch” by using the ability for the -er suffix to indicate a profession or association with a noun in English i.e. Cash > Cashier, someone who handles cash/payments (actually derived from french with the -ier suffix, but point still stands). In the cass of Witcher it is one who works as/with witches or else one who is associated with Witches.
Hawk > Hawker = One who “hawks”
What do they do with the Hawk?
They hunt with it, they’re a “hawk hunter”.
Run > Runner = One who “runs”
Hawk can be a verb meaning “to hunt with a hawk”. It can also be a verb meaning "To peddle goods aggressively, especially by calling out. "
If they’re hawking, i.e. hunting with a hawk, then they’re a hawker.
Hawk can be a verb meaning “to hunt with a hawk”.
Because over time, we dropped the second word …
An the second usage is “hock”
Which is a completely different word… People used “hawk” for selling because, well people don’t always know what they’re doing. But language evolves. Use “literally” to mean “figuratively” enough, and dictionaries start listing that as an option.
Because dictionaries aren’t to teach people how to speak, they’re for people trying to understand what someone else said.
Which is literally my whole point.
Over centuries, words change
https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hock-hawk/
But you typed that very confidently, so you got that going for you at least.
