I love examining my language. One of my co-workers is learning English and we often talk about parts of English that I've never given any thought.
The word nutty came up the other day when I was describing a flavor. "Oh," he said, "you can put a 'y' on 'nut' and make a new word."
"Yes, " I said, though it had never occurred to me before, "the noun becomes an adjective."
Then we started talking about how many English words can have a 'y' added.
Rain Rainy
Cloud Cloudy
Wind Windy
Salt Salty
Water Watery
Chocolate (uh oh, I thought, this is something different, chocolaty means it's like chocolate, but may not be chocolate, it has some aspect of chocolate. The different is subtle but there.
Then came 'smart' and 'smarty', there's a difference for you, depending upon how 'smarty' is used.
Nothing profound here, just interesting.
We just got started on '-----ling'.
gosling, duckling, foundling, yearling, changeling
Joe(I blame the Danes)Nation
@Joe Nation,
Yeah, what about kindling? That's small wood for the fire.
Coddling? That's cooking eggs
codling?
cuddling?
@McTag,
I'm pretty sure kindling refers to the reading of ebooks.
