Found by Victor Steinbok on Google+:
Heart-warming though the sentiments are, my interest here is in the syntax: the all-purpose verb do and its wide range of complements. The ten complements illustrated here — seven NPs, two AdjPs, and a quotation — are none of them established idioms with do, though they can all be seen as instances of a recent pattern.
Then some words about the versatility of do and about do drag.
Caught on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, in the story “Tyler Saladino’s Quest to Play Major League Baseball”, Saladino admits to being nervous in his quest, but added that “it’s a good nervous”.
A nouning of the adjective nervous, used to convey, roughly, ‘nervousness’.
From Dennis Preston, this item from Ann Arbor:
And we’d be surprised if some of the hiccups we encountered don’t get taken care of before our next visit. In the meantime, the Wurst is a really fun place for a hang and a nice addition to Ypsilanti’s food-and-drink landscape. (link)
Yes, a nouning of the intransitive slang verb hang ‘hang out (with)’. New to Dennis (and to me), but not to the world in general.
On an opinion piece on KQED-FM heard this morning, commenter Bobby Podesta was identified as
head of creative at a San Francisco startup
— with the noun creative referring to the “creative department” of the firm, that is, the department responsible for the “artistic product” of the firm.
One more nouning of the adjective creative, to add to the others attested in the OED.
Heard on an old episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a reference to some films as “primo monkey-spank material”. Similarly:
Most men probably only know American Apparel as primo monkey-spank material. But there are a few men who actually wear the clothing. (link)
Now a few words on morphological developments from the colorful euphemistic idiom spank the / one’s monkey ‘masturbate’.
Nouning and underwear, together at last! Brought together by the Undergear people:
Literally revealing everything. With some play on the word big as well.
These days the big reveal is all over the place, in a range of senses of the noun reveal — ‘disclosure, announcement, unveiling’ — related to the various senses of the verb reveal.
Yesterday morning on radio station KFJC, host Robert Emmett was talking about various early movies showing in the Bay Area and came to an actor he described as a silent cowboy. This wasn’t intended to be the Adj silent plus the head N cowboy (though it has the same accent pattern as this combination), but rather the N silent plus this head: cowboy (well, someone who plays a cowboy) in silents — that is, in silent movies.
So, first we have the nouning silent ‘silent film/movie’ (note specialization of the Adj silent ‘without sound’ to the movie context, and recall that before the advent of talkies, all movies were silent in this sense). Then, we get compounds in which the N silent serves as first element — like silent cowboy. Like so many compounds, this one takes some serious interpretive work.
From Jon Lighter to ADS-L yesterday:
An attorney on Fox News oberves that the tot mom’s defense is that she’d been victimized by repeated “sexual molest.”
A new nouning? Well, probably not.
From John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” (“A journey to the flip side of Disney”), in the New York Times Magazine of June 12, p. 29:
An anonymous person, evidently the veteran of a staggering number of weed-smoking experiences in the park, had done a solid for the community and laid out his or her knowledge in a systematic way [on a website]. It was nothing less than a fiend’s guide to Disney World.
I understood the slang nouning in do a solid (for someone), as having solid ‘favor’ (nouned from the adjective solid), and felt vaguely that I’d heard it before. (more…)