/lit/ - Literature

Is there a term for when a certain combination of words is so commonly put together that it effectively becomes a single, stock term, and then people come to enunciate it in ways that don't really make sense for the original combination?

Like, if you have the original two words "uniform deviate," meaning simply "a deviate which is uniform," and pronounced "U-niform DE-viate," with equal stress at the beginning of both distinct words because the original speakers perceive them as perfectly distinct, but it gradually comes to be used as a single unit so often that it gets perceived linguistically by the unconscious that way, and then our natural tendency toward euphony smooths out the pronunciation as it would a single long word ("U-niformdeviate," removing the halting emphasis on the beginning of the second word).

Is there anything in linguistics about this? I don't know anything about linguistics, so I don't know where to start looking. I was just thinking about how words are combined into new "units" like this, and the original etymology is lost but people still perfectly understand the meaning of the new unit.

Or similar things, like certain adages still being used and fundamentally understood by people who don't understand the original phrasing or vocabulary (e.g., because it's archaic). For instance I know someone who knows exactly what "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" means, but has no fucking idea what that phrase LITERALLY means, because he has no clue what a gander is.

>>6536712
>God is so loving that he made his only eternal punishment for us no more miserable than our earthly existence.
are you jesting us? op wanted a real answer

>>6444784
Vicar. Kek.
And yes, only about 10% of European Catholics are actually Catholic. More in a few countries. Less in some. You can't be an honest educated Catholic and believe in those things, heck even in "vicars".
It's blasphemy by any standards.

>>6407870
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8525600-boyfriends-with-girlfriends?from_search=true
http://www.amazon.com/Boyfriends-Girlfriends-Alex-Sanchez-ebook/dp/B003V1WWVK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429132535&sr=8-1&keywords=boyfriends+with+girlfriend
Go read the whole thing. There's not really any cucking in it.

>>6291138
>dfw nutted but she still suckin

>>6073731
>gif