A Kenning

They called me The Walking Dictionary in elementary school;  I wrote about this in one of my earliest posts.

Daddooooo never used a fifty cent word when a two dollar one would do; I seem to have inherited that trait.

I rarely come upon a word I don't know, or can't figure out.  Immiserate, for example.  I never saw or heard it before, but from the context I could deduce its meaning. 

At first I thought that Harry Litman was showing off in The New Republic, writing about the prosecutions of innocent enemies whom Trump simply wants to immiserate.

But it's a really good word, isn't it?

In that same article, he gave me another new word.  I was merrily reading along until I stumbled over this: Descriptions of (diGenova) typically append the kenning “Trump loyalist” or “longtime Trump ally.” 

Kenning?  Did it carry positive or negative connotations? Did it imply that the phrase was trite?  Did it have something to do with the quotation marks?  Turns out it's not descriptive; it's the name of the phrase.  As MerriamWebster informed me, it is a metaphorical compound word or phrase (such as swan-road for ocean) used especially in Old English and Old Norse poetry.

I can't feel too bad about not having come across it before.  According to the OED,  there are about 0.04 occurrences per million words in modern written English.

Definitely showing off.