A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
The Lawson site offers advice on how to make your own cressheads (or cress heads, or, I suppose, cress-heads). In any case, an expression you probably have never encountered before, but nevertheless understand.
(#2) Attractive — and edible as well
Linguistic notes. Welcome to the world of compound nouns of the form X + head. The beginning of some search results:
acidhead, airhead, arrowhead, baldhead, barehead, barrelhead, beachhead, bighead, blackhead, blockhead, bonehead, bubblehead, bullhead, butthead, chowderhead, chucklehead, clubhead, cokehead, coolhead, copperhead, Deadhead, drumhead, dumbhead, dunderhead …
The full set comes in three types:
1: partitive –head ‘top or main part of’: e.g. arrowhead, barrelhead, clubhead, drumhead, flowerhead
2: predicative –head:
— Adj –head: ‘someone or something with an Adj head’: baldhead, barehead, bighead, blackhead, coolhead
— N –head ‘someone or something with a head that’s (a) N or like (a) N’: bullhead (also available for productive use, as in cresshead and in — random example — eaglehead ‘something with a head that’s an eagle or like one’, as in an eaglehead as company logo)
3: disparaging –head (largely negative sense developments of predicative –head):
— acidhead, cokehead, pothead: –head ‘addict of’; cf. Deadhead –head ‘fan of’
— airhead, blockhead, bonehead, chowderhead, chucklehead, dumbhead, dunderhead, etc.: –head ‘stupid or thoughtless person’
— butthead: –head ‘contemptible person’ [from NOAD: noun shithead: vulgar slang ‘a contemptible person’]
April 6, 2026 at 7:50 pm |
I had always assumed “dickhead” was the predicative “he has a dick for a head” (comparable to “butthead”) but seeing that British people say “bellend” with much the same meaning, I had started to wonder if it was in fact the partitive “he is the head of a dick”. Any thoughts on this one?
April 7, 2026 at 7:51 am |
Ah, both interpretations are possible, so we get *ambiguity*. I can report on getting (good) advice from several sources about keeping my dickhead clean (I am cut, but it’s still possible to get pockets of smegma); meanwhile, I can report on guys being insulted as dickheads. Both things happen.
April 7, 2026 at 8:39 am
Right, I know there’s the literal and the insulting “dickhead”; my question was about whether the insult itself is “he has a dick for a head” or “he is (like) the head of a dick”, after seeing “bellend” as an insult, which is “the head of a dick”.
April 7, 2026 at 8:48 am
To Bird’s reply to my reply: I doubt that we can tease out one insulting source over another.
April 7, 2026 at 12:23 pm |
Reading your examples of the partitive form, I could not escape the notion of the titular instrument in R&H’s “Flower Drum Song”, which must have had a flowerdrumhead. Far from escaping it, I had an earworm start.
April 7, 2026 at 12:29 pm |
I seem to be leaving a trail of earworms in my path recently. Warning: read with caution.