Today we'll focus on compound words. Our correspondent noted that while it's relatively easy to think of nouns composed of a noun plus a verb in its agentival form (screwdriver for example, and skyscraper), it isn't nearly as easy to come up with compound nouns in the reverse order—that is, created by a verb followed by its direct object. Daredevil comes to mind, and so does killjoy, but what else? Scarecrow works but pinchpenny doesn't, since pinchpenny is an adjective, not a noun. Rotgut is good, but hangnail isn't: although you might assume that was created by pairing "hang" with the "nail" from which the loose skin hangs, in fact hangnail has a linguistic ancestor in agnail, meaning "a sore or inflammation about a fingernail or toenail."