Graham Thirkill wrote:
It must be a nightmare for Foreign students getting into the English language.
Cheers and Beers
Graham
Speakers and writers using English have a strong historical tendency to modify and extend borrowed names and portmanteau neologisms (some created from classical languages) in strange and wonderful ways.
Take for instance the recent set of curious new formations which build on misapprehensions regarding the derivation of the word helicopter (a combination of helico = spiraling or rotary and pter = wing or feather)
Helipad - is this a prepared landing site as seen by an inebriated helicopter pilot?
Quadcopter - possibly a winged device produced by a firm known as Quadco
Hexacopter - this would seem to be an even newer winged device made by Quadco's corporate competitor Hexaco.
There is also the lowly Hamburger, a sandwich made using chopped or ground beef - that is beef which is prepared in a manner ascribed to the inhabitants (burghers) of Hamburg (a port city on the North Sea). Mischievous extensions of the name of this sandwich have produced a myriad of odd 'burgers.
Cheeseburger - Though many burgs are famously associated with cheese, those towns (and regions) are usually associated with specific varieties of cheese.
Bacon Cheeseburger - Bacon Cheeseburg probably has a waiting list of want-to-be inhabitants.
Veggieburger - One might expect that Veggieburg's burghers would be clad entirely in plant-based textiles.
Soyburger - A co-worker who originally came from rural Illinois refers to the central part of his home state as 'Soybeania.' Soyburg might well be a small town, possibly an unknown county seat in rural central Illinois' Soybeania region.
Fishburger - Another flavorful sandwich ascribed to the burghers who inhabit some small fishing port.
Sandwiches made of chopped ham, ground pork and even chopped Spam have been offered as hamburgers in some parts of the world - each was, I'm sure, delicious in its own way.