Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From the 8/25/12 Economist, “Touchable after all”, p. 32:

The arrest shocked the country and foreign investors. [Vietnamese banking tycoon Nguyen Duc] Kien was one of the Bentley-driving, abalone-munching moguls though untouchable because of the wealth, power and connections they amassed as the ruling Communist Party followed China’s lead in opening up the economy.

Bentley-driving and abalone-munching: two synthetic compounds incorporating an object into a V in its PRP (or -ing) form, the whole used here invidiously to characterize someone’s social habits, especially what they eat and drink — a morphological construction (with its sociocultural concomitants) featured notably in the title of Geoff Nunberg’s 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.

(I sometimes think of this as “Nunberg incorporation”.)

This entry was posted on August 30, 2012 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Language and politics, Synthetic compounds. 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.