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When I was a kid, I thought people struggled to “make En’s meat.” I didn’t know who En was — someone from the Bible, most likely — but I knew he was a carnivore who ran up big grocery bills. I was still young when I learned that, actually, you “make ends meet.”
Other terms took longer to get right. Well into adulthood I remained baffled as to why a fair-haired child was toe-headed. Toes come in a wide range of colors. So I didn’t see what they had to do with blondness. Eventually I learned it’s “towheaded.” This one doesn’t have the “Ah, that makes sense” quality of “make ends meet.” A grownup reading the term “towhead” could be forgiven for picturing a human head being dragged behind a AAA truck. Plus, with both Merriam-Webster’s and Webster’s New World in agreement that the preferred spelling of “towheaded” takes no hyphen, that same adult might understandably see the word on the page and hear in her mind’s ear “too-weeded.”