Just so you know: the rather boring spaced compound "tour boat captain" describing Lana Del Rey's husband in her English wikipedia entry has to compete with the much more evocative, concatenated compound "Sumpfbootkapitän" '[swamp + boat] + captain' in her German entry.
#compoundWatch #English #German

Somehow especially disappointing that "end product" is not written as one word.
#compoundWatch

Nice string of three "X house" compounds that are quite different from what one usually thinks of when hearing the word "house":
"They [restaurants]'ve set up in vacant filling stations, lumber mills, warehouses, halfway houses, firehouses, churches, chop shops, storefronts, studios, scrapyards, and school buses; [...]" (Estleman, Cutthroat dogs, Chapter 13)
In fact, if one applies whether any constitutent appears in the definition as a test of #semanticTransparency, Wikipedia's definition of "halfway house" renders it completely semantically opaque:
"A halfway house is a type of prison or institute intended to teach (or reteach) the necessary skills for people to re-integrate into society and better support and care for themselves. " The entry also explains the motivation behind the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway_house
#compoundWatch #English

When looking for the scope and aims of the journal "The Mental Lexicon" (I am working on a review :)), I noticed a cross next to Gary Libben's name: apparently he passed on last year,.
He was always a most friendly, fun, and enthusiastic person whenever I met him at conferences, and of course he was a very major lover of compounds and everything about them.
Here is a link to an obituary:
https://brocku.ca/brock-news/2025/05/brock-mourns-the-passing-of-applied-linguistics-prof/
#compoundWatch #GaryLibben

Wollte eigentlich nur Nachschauen was "Preisschnapsen" ist (= Schnapsen um Preise, wobei Schnapsen ein Kartenspiel ist). Kam darüber noch zur "Kathederblüte" (= Stilblüte von einer Lehrperson), und auch diesem schönen, Johann Georg August Galletti zugeschriebenen Ausspruch:
"Ihr denkt wohl, Geschichte ist so leicht als Schnarps? Ach, Geschichte kann man in einer Stunde lernen, aber an Schnarps muß man mehrere Jahre studiren."
#compoundWatch
Mehr hier: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnapsen

Learned a most excellent #English birdname today: "Goldeneye". As the picture illustrates, a well-motivated metonymic name for a duck. You ask, is the #German name not perhaps also a most excellent name. I would say: it is ok, "Schellente" Schelle/schellen 'bell/to ring'' + ente 'duck'. Apparently motivated by the characteristic sounds that they make when flying (unfortunately I have not heard them flying :().
#compoundWatch #semanticTransparency
Image credits: Hyla meridionalis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Walking to the train station after visiting an old friend in Hamburg/Altona, I stumbled across a sign containing this weirdly configured German compound: "Dampfmarzipanfabrik" steam + marzipan + factory. Intuitively, my reading was: factory for steam marzipan. AFAIK, no such thing as steam marzipan exists, and it does indeed refer to a steam-powered factory for marzipan. Web-searching reveals different spellings (e.g. Dampf-Marzipanfabrik), but for me, "Marzipandampffabrik" would have been the configuration of choice (but the sequence "mpff" looks ugly)
#compoundWatch

#compoundWatch: useful #MandarinChinese compound:
病友 bing4you3 illness + friend: 'friend made while being in a hospital', and also just 'wardmate'