For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in
crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)
commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)
A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.
Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.
What is beheading? From my 12/3/17 posting “Off with their heads!”:
Beheading is a word-formation process with
input: a 2-part expression-type Z = X + Y, where X is modifier and Y is head, so Z shares various syntactic properties with Y (in particular, syntactic category and subcategories)
output: a new expression-type X, with the syntactic properties and semantics of Z
Intuitively, Z has its head Y deleted — Z is “beheaded” — with its syntactic properties (including category) and its semantics inherited by the remainder/remnant X.
(And the derived item, with the phonology of X and the semantics of Z , can be referred to as a beheading: like the nouns crude and commemorative in the examples above.)
Some everyday beheadings. Two Ns spare, two Ns flat, and three Ns special. All entries from NOAD.
spare.
adj. spare: 1 additional to what is required for ordinary use: few people had spare cash for inessentials. …
noun spare: 1 [a] [AZ: a spare item] an item kept in case another item of the same type is lost, broken, or worn out: with three to choose from, your child will never be without a spare. [b] a spare tire: make sure there are no problems with any of the tires, including the spare. …
flat.
adj. flat: 1 [g] (of shoes) without heels or with very low heels. … 3 [a] (of a sparkling drink) having lost its effervescence: flat champagne. [b] of something kept inflated, especially a tire) having lost some or all of its air, typically because of a puncture: you’ve got a flat tire.
noun flat: 1 [d] [AZ: a flat shoe] a shoe with a very low heel or no heel: she wore a white strapless dress and a pair of electric blue flats. … 3 informal, mainly North American a flat tire: I’ve got a flat — there were nails under the wheel.
special.
adj. special: 1 [d] designed or organized for a particular person, purpose, or occasion: we will return by special coaches.
noun special: [a] [AZ: a special event / broadcast] a thing, such as an event, product, or broadcast, that is designed or organized for a particular occasion or purpose: television’s election night specials. [b] [AZ: a special dish] a dish not on the regular menu at a restaurant but served on a particular day. [c] [AZ: a special offer] informal a product or service offered at a temporarily reduced price: Mrs. Hill was a careful shopper, choosing house brands and in-store specials.
Novel beheadings, exquisitely context-bound. Suppose a restaurant offers one hot lunch special each day — a stew or a pasta dish — and one cold lunch special — some sort of salad. When you go there for lunch, you can then ask your server what the hot is for the day and what the cold is, and you can expect them to understand that without explanation.
As it turns out, I have a real-life variant of this story to tell you. My Princeton eating club offered one hot cereal for breakfast each day (plus a standing assortment of cold cereals): one day oatmeal, one day Wheatena, one day Cream of Wheat (maybe there were more, but I remember these three). When you arrived for breakfast, the waiter would announce the day’s selection, for example:
Wheatena’s the hot.
Most of us had never heard this use of hot before we joined the club, and it’s not in dictionaries, but in this highly constrained context, we got it right away.
Once you’ve seen these stories, you could concoct tales that would provide backing for no end of novel beheadings. Some beheadings turned out to be useful in specific sociocultural settings, so got conventionalized. Others wait in the wings; maybe their time will come.
Joe Biden’s three squares. On the whitehouse.gov site on 1/19/22, from “Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference”:
Now, should everybody in America know [about Biden’s COVID vaccine program]? No, they don’t necessarily know that; they’re just trying to figure how to put three squares on the table and stay safe.
A few commenters (from media sources, as I recall) took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch. It pissed me off that the media were doing Helmet Grabpussy’s campaigning for him by harping on the theme of Biden’s being too old and infirm and incompetent to serve another term. I was ready to bash back at these commenters, but when I went to get the offending quotations, they had all been removed from the net.
But then I did some searching on the idiom square meal ‘a full or complete meal’ (Merriam Webster online), which is very widely used (though it’s possible that it’s no longer current in speakers under 30). And three squares a day gets lots of hits too — so it was no surprise that NOAD turned out to have an entry for beheaded square (<- square meal):
noun square: … 6 North American informal a square meal: three squares a day
Hah! Biden’s very usage.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move on.
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