Yet another example of a noun-noun compound that can only be correctly understood by someone who can fill in the story that connects the referents of the two nouns — what Pamela Downing in her 1977 Language article on compounding called “deictic compounds” (she offered the wonderful pumpkin bus, complete with the story) and I call “distant compounds” in my compounding files. More examples popped up in comments on Geoff Pullum’s 2008 Language Log posting on canoe wife.
Headlines are particularly fertile ground for distant compounds, since they require packing a lot of information into a few words, and compounding is good for that. So, in the January 12 New York Times, p. A12, a news brief with the head:
Mississippi: Two Accused of Stealing Hurricane Money
The brief goes on to explain that two women “are being accused of stealing more than $721,000 in Hurricane Katrina relief money.”
August 2, 2010 at 5:35 am |
[…] Log, or on ADS-L) — a “distant compound” (see discussion of hurricane money here in January): to understand the relationship between the second N (the head) and the first (the modifier), you […]
August 2, 2010 at 5:35 am |
[…] Log, or on ADS-L) — a “distant compound” (see discussion of hurricane money here in January): to understand the relationship between the second N (the head) and the first (the modifier), you […]
June 27, 2012 at 7:19 am |
[…] boy” is what Arnold Zwicky calls a distant compound. These are noun-noun compounds “that can only be correctly understood by […]
September 26, 2012 at 5:28 pm |
[…] ostentatious, jokey status. And therefore grates on many people’s ears. (Compare X-gate with “distant” N + N compounds, which are equally context-specific and short-lived, but don’t generally arouse such […]