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.
( Bill Bryson )
[ The Mother Tongue: English and ]
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