In today’s One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe are back on the track of trying to make sense of things they haven’t heard before:
(#1)
Lots of knowledge needed here — about the words of English and about sociocultural conventions:
Archive for the ‘Nouning’ Category
May-June turnover
June 1, 2014A One Big Happy from yesterday (May 25), on conversational organization; and then three from this morning’s (June 1st) crop: a Bizarro with an ambiguity introduced by truncation; yet another meta-Zippy, this time on reports of Zippy’s death; and a Rhymes With Orange with a pun from the Black Lagoon.
smartass
May 12, 2013An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ‘impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
Brief mention: Hairspray mass nouning
May 12, 2013From the 1988 movie version of Hairspray (which I watched for Mothers Day):
You better brace yourself for a whole lot of ugly coming from a never-ending parade of stupid.
(with reference to the consequences of integrating a teen dance show on tv).
Mass-nouning of ugly and stupid, in a single sentence. It might be relevant that the line comes from a black character, Motormouth Maybelle (played by Ruth Brown).
On nounings of stupid in several senses, with links to other discussions, see this posting.
penultimate
May 1, 2013
Manliness and money
April 13, 2013
Nouning in the NYT
April 2, 2013In the NYT Sunday Review of 3/31, a nice piece by Henry Hitchings on nouning (“Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns”). The illustration:
Language play log
December 15, 2012Three items with language play in them that came by me recently, in the order of their appearance: (1) the Mental Floss list of their ten best-selling t-shirts; (2) an Ian Shoales piece rushing through “The Catchphrase History of the World”; and (3) some porn flick titles.
sprouts
December 5, 2012From Geoff Nathan on ADS-L, the Pearls Before Swine cartoon from yesterday:
Geoff offered Rat’s derivation of sprouts as a prime example of of etymythology, and that it certainly is. Discussion on the strip’s site, meanwhile, took up the question of sprouts ‘sprouted seeds used as an ingredient or accompaniment in food preparation’ vs. sprouts ‘Brussels sprouts’; as far as I know, no one puts Brussels sprouts in sandwiches, and Goat’s sandwich surely has alfalfa sprouts or something similar in it. (more…)
Truncated lame duck
November 27, 2012Caught on Facebook this morning:
Help us protect Social Security and Medicare benefits during the lame duck by signing our petition! (link)
This has the nominal lame duck as a truncated version of the N + N compound lame duck Congress/session — an ad hoc truncation that is interpretable given context and background knowledge.