Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Via Federico Escobar, a 10/5/09 Farley Katz cartoon in the New Yorker:

As I note every month or so, N + N compounds have a large range of possible interpretations, hinging on the relationship between the referents of the two nouns. Even sticking to the canonical relationships, every such compound is potentially ambiguous, though some of the interpretations will be absurd.

As in this case. The conventionalized interpretation for cowbell is ‘bell for cows’, but here the cartoonist has chosen the alternative ‘bell made of cows’. Not a pretty sight.

This entry was posted on October 18, 2010 at 10:31 am and is filed under Compounds, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.