Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zits:

Pierce indulges in a pile-up of modifiers in the composite expression personal reference respite environments. These pile-ups are characteristic of newspaper headlines (especially in British papers) and other contexts where brevity is valued, like signage, but they also have a home in officialese, business jargon, and other types of “technical talk”, where they function as much to convey seriousness as to save space (in this case, incorporating the jargonish respite, environment, personal, and reference).

Despite his appearance, Pierce might have a future in an office environment.

This entry was posted on November 25, 2011 at 9:52 am and is filed under Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology. 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.