Lizzie Borden should've used a gun

In the course of a conversation today, the word "axe-murderer" came up. This got SC to pondering -- why just axes? Well, according to Google, not quite:

axe-murderer: 31,800 hits
gun-murderer: 42 hits
sword-murderer: 21 hits
knife-murderer: 239 hits
poison-murderer: 2 hits

Now, in the last case, we have a perfectly good word for someone who uses poisons to murder, poisoner, so it's understandable that we don't have "poison-murderer". But there aren't any words for someone who uses a sword, knife, or gun to kill someone. If there was something about blade weapons that inspired "axe-murderer", we'd at least expect to see "sword-murderer" or "knife-murderer". So there's nothing salient about axes having blades, at least for the purpose of singling them out as murder weapons. Of course, SC isn't aware of any poetry popularizing another murder technique like this:

Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.

Someone out there thinks that "hacker" is actually derived from "axe-murderer. Or maybe golfer. SC has always had a hard time telling the difference.

Comments

[language hat]

That's very strange indeed, and I can't even figure out where to go about looking for an explanation.

...Huh.

Language is weird.

[6rtu]

u r stupid