so's your old man

[fox]

Since jae brought up the famous Eskimo vocabulary hoax (and its Dutch and, I maintain, English cousin, as well), I was reminded that from time to time I am amused by how many epithets we can use in English by prefixing something onto the word head. Observe (though this will not be an exhaustive list because I am much nicer than that [g]):

insulting prefixes to add to -head:

• block-
  
• bone-
  
• butt-
  
• chowder-
  
• chuckle-
  
• dick-
  
• doo-doo-
  
• dunder-
  
• lunk-
  
• meat-
  
• poopy-
  
• shit-
  
• thick-

Other suggestions are more than welcome, of course, to say nothing of related concepts like addle- (-pate[d]), bird- (-brain), etc.

All of these imply that the object of the epithet is of less than normal intelligence, of course. Interestingly, I can think of just the one such thing implying that the object is of greater than normal intelligence (and it's not exactly a compliment, is the thing):

prefixes going the other way:

• egg-

Thoughts?

Comments

[jae]

German does this too, and much in the same way (e.g. Dummkopf, Hitzkopf, Wirrkopf, among others). Although I think that's less remarkable of German than it is of English, because the very existence of the German language can be attributed to compound words. *g*

-J