Coming up on Word Matters,
the breath of fresh air brought by the word whistleblower and hipsters before they were hip.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
The word whistleblower brings some dignity to a collection of synonyms that formerly did not exactly invite willing association.
It also had some shifting to do to get there.
Amin explains.
In English, we have this great tradition of compound nouns,
taking two words and compounding them, putting them together.
And in a lot of cases,
the way that the word moves is it goes from an open compound of having two individual words to two words separated by a hyphen or something,
and then we end up with a closed compound.
The word kind of grows together.
And in a lot of cases, these words have very distinct meanings,
which make perfect sense when they start off.
And then when you put them together and you travel forward several hundred years or a hundred years,
it's a little opaque.
An example of this is jerkwater,
which we define as meaning remote, unimportant, like a jerkwater town.