Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Bizarro, on the opposite of easy chair:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

From OED2 on easy chair:

A chair adapted for sitting or half reclining in in an easy posture, often furnished with arms and padded back.
1707   G. Farquhar Beaux Stratagem iv. 41   Get my easie Chair down Stairs, put the Gentleman in it.
1713   R. Steele in Guardian 11 Aug. 1/2   Immers’d in the Luxury of an Easie Chair.
1855   Macaulay Hist. Eng. IV. 371   His host was confined by gout to an easy chair.
1881   A. R. Ellis Sylvestra II. 65   He sunk..into an easy chair, pipe-and-bottle life.

And from Wiktionary:

noun easy chair: A comfortable chair, often well-upholstered; a lounge chair.
1908: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows. “Let’s sit quiet a bit, Toady!” said the Rat, throwing himself into an easy chair, while the Mole took another by the side of him and made some civil remark about Toad’s delightful residence.

The Adj + N composite has primary accent on its first element, like a compound — an accent pattern that goes along with its conventionalized, opaque semantics. Contrast the invented èasy cháir ‘chair that is easy’, with second-element accent and transparent semantics.

This entry was posted on November 17, 2017 at 9:02 am and is filed under Compounds, Lexical semantics, 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.