How the way languages work ruined my day!

A tale of a stupid minigame

So today I was eating a chickenburger, and like a puzzleholic, I was playing pinpoint on linkedin. If you have never played before, the goal of the game is to find what category encompasses five clues. In the beginning you only get to see one clue. Then you make a guess about the category. If you are correct, congrats! You won! However, if you are wrong, you get to see another clue. And the process repeats with the rest of clues until you find the category, or you run out of clues. Also, the guess doesn't have to be precise. The game is quite lenient, and also accepts terms that are related to the expected answer.

So I saw that the first clue was:

Path

Ok, this can be a million things, so I guessed url.

It was, in fact, not url.

That's ok, let's see what clues we have now:

Path
Meteor

... What? I literally had no clue how these two go together... (And If you have already spotted the pattern and are screaming at me... I will also be screaming by the end of this post).

My best guess at this point was to guess finder. As you might have guessed, finder was wrong, so these are the clues now:

Path
Meteor
Cardi

My confusion starts getting bigger and bigger. What does a singer have to do with paths, and meteors?? Now my best attempt was to guess just b. My thinking was: "Cardi B" is a singer, "Meteor B" could be the name of a meteor, and "Path B" sounds like a thing?

I was getting desperate ok? Of course b was wrong, so the clues now are:

Path
Meteor
Cardi
Bi

I am going to Di... The clues continue to leave me clueless, so now am thinking that maybe, maybe, all these terms are... latin derived? So I put "latin" as a guess, hoping that I would not suffer the humiliation of a 5-clue day.

And I was wrong...

So now it is time for the final clue:

Path
Meteor
Cardi
Bi
Archae

THEY ARE WORDS THAT END IN -OLOGY. I add ology as a guess in the input and... it is correct... And a 5-clue day it is... BUT THIS TIME... THIS TIME I HAVE AN EXCUSE!

I GOT R E B R A C K E T E D!

What is rebracketing?

Well rebracketing is a linguistics phenomenon where, basically, words are split wrong. It might surprise you, but -ology is not a real suffix. The actual suffix is -logy. Meaning "the study of". Just like path, meteor, cardi, bi, and archae are not real words!

Pathology is actually split as patho- (from greek πάθος meaning suffering) and -logy. Meteorology comes from the greek word μετέωρος (something in the sky, this is were meteor, meteorite etc come from), and -logy Biology come from the greek βίος meaning life, and -logy. Bi is not a greek word!

And this has happened to some widely used words.

The word chickenburger is a product of rebracketing. Hamburger was split "incorrectly" in ham and burger, instead of the "correct" hamburg and -er. And then people started using the suffix -burger to basically mean "something patty-like between two buns". (In case it is not obvious, I was not actually eating a chicken burger today. I just wanted to have examples to give)

The word puzzleholic is also possible due to rebracketing. Alcoholic was split "incorrectly" in alco and -holic instead of alcohol and -ic. And then people started using the suffix -holic to mean "someone who is addicted".

So yeah... I got a bit annoyed today because I needed to see all 5 clues to get the connection. Even when the words came from my own language! But I hope you were at least a bit entertained, and maybe you learned something in the process.