Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Jon Lighter on ADS-L, this report:

CNN tells of a hockey player who “loves to hard-hit.”

That’s a back-formation from the expressions hard-hitting and/or hard-hitter — synthetic compounds of a type I don’t think I’ve written about here (with an adverb incorporated into the compound, rather than a noun, as is usually the case).

I haven’t found the CNN quotation on-line, and searches for other examples of a verb hard-hit run up against the use of hard-hit as a modifier (with PSP hit), as in

Wintry storm brings new woe to hard-hit Northeast (link)

Can Hard-Hit States Reinvent Themselves? (link)

This entry was posted on March 3, 2013 at 9:09 am and is filed under Back formation, Synthetic compounds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.