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.
That's very strange indeed, and I can't even figure out where to go about looking for an explanation.
...Huh.
Language is weird.
Posted by: language hat | May 26, 2004 at 01:28 PM
u r stupid
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Posted by: scrn | January 31, 2008 at 10:50 AM