Of werewolves and cranberries

This is the kind of thing I usually annoy Amy with by email, but since no one reads this except Amy and maybe three other people, why not just put it here?

There’s this (great) Throwing Muses song called "Garoux des Larmes". Somewhere on the internets, I can’t remember where, I encountered someone who translated this as "Werewolves of the Tears", which: not exactly. The French word for werewolf is loup-garou (pl. loups-garoux), loup being the word for wolf. Garou, on the other hand, is not the word for anything. (At least, not the French word for anything; I researched it once [me = tremendous dork] and found that it’s a Provençal word for a type of shrub. I don’t think that’s relevant in this context.) It appears that garou is an example of what linguists call a cranberry morpheme. If you can’t be arsed following that link, and you’re not Amy, I’ll tell you, briefly, that a cranberry morpheme is a unit of language that transmits meaning in a compound word but has no meaning on its own. Everyone knows that a cranberry is different from a blueberry or a strawberry, and that they are all berries, so "cran" transmits meaning in that it distinguishes one type of berry from another, yet divorced from its partner, "cran" is meaningless. Likewise, garou is meaningless outside of the compound loup-garou.

Just today I realized something that is doubtless coincidental yet utterly fascinating: the "were" of English "werewolf" is also a cranberry morpheme! How kooky is that? I realized this, by the way, while learning that the "were" in werewolf comes from an Indo-European root meaning "man" (hence "manwolf": makes total sense), which you can also see in the Latin cognate vir.

Cranberry morphemes are generally free to form other compounds, which is why we can have words like cranapple and wererabbit (though these are often hyphenated, which would seem to indicate that the neologists who invent them aren’t totally convinced that it’s kosher). I wondered if, in France, Wallace and Gromit had to deal with un lapin-garou, and heeeeeeeee: they did!

I love language.