It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like
It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.
