Two N-N compounds that came by me recently, one silly, one serious. Both are subsective: the referent of the compound as a whole is a subtype of the referent of the second (head) noun. But in neither case is the relationship between the two nouns straightforward.
First, today’s Bizarro:
Then there’s the N-N compound hope chest, heard dimly on some tv show as I was wakening from a nap.
On the first, there already is a compound bullfrog, also subsective and semantically complex. From OED2:
bullfrog The name given to certain large American frogs, esp. Rana pipiens, a species 6 or 8 inches long, which has a voice not unlike that of a bull.
So there is a connection to bulls, but it’s not very direct.
But the cartoon has a different sense of bull, namely ‘bullshit’ (so there’s a pun here); the frog in the cartoon purveys bullshit; from NOAD2 on bullshit:
noun stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense.
The compound is subsective but the connection between frog and bull is again indirect.
On to hope chest. From OED2:
n. chiefly U.S. a chest or box in which a young woman hopefully collects articles towards a home of her own in the event of her marriage. [first cite 1911]
(The Wikipedia article is of course much more detailed.)
Hope chest is subsective; it refers to a chest, in one of the senses of chest. Again, the connection to the first noun, hope, is indirect, though hopefulness figures in the OED‘s definition.
[After I was fully awake, I began to wonder about hope chests. Does this social practice have much currency these days? The Wikipedia article is written mostly in the past tense.]
Leave a Reply