Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Nouning by truncation, with the nominal Adj + food abbreviated to Adj, but still functioning as a nominal: Mexican ‘Mexican food’.

This particular pattern of nouning has come up here before, in a 10/10/12 posting on cartoonist Andy Singer, with #3:

Bears Adjust to Urban Living: “Let’s eat Chinese tonight”

Indian, Italian, etc. can be similarly converted. Consider, for example, the Tripadvisor report on the Amity Motor Inn in Albany, Western Australia: “A bed for the night and Indian for dinner”. And the Pinterest site “Italian for dinner”, with recipes for Italian dishes.

This entry was posted on September 2, 2014 at 4:07 am and is filed under Conversion, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Truncation. 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.