Showing posts with label verbs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label verbs. Show all posts

Sunday, November 28, 2021

From verb to noun, on the rebound

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Some time early in our relationship, my wife set down a plate or cup in front of me and said with indulgent and somewhat satiric glee, "you sit down an have an enjoy."

I thought that was hysterical for some reason, and it's been a watchword in our house for 40 years. I often try to fathom why it seems so funny, and get a grip on the intuition that led Cindy to manufacture a noun, enjoy, by accenting the first syllable of a common verb. My lingering association is with "escape" in Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, below (reproducing Guthrie's pronunciation):

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Newspaper taxes readers' decoding chops

From the Dept. of headlines that tax your ability to sort out nouns from verbs from modifiers, decode this from the WSJ home page, 3:20 ET, 6/29/10 (probably gone before you get there, and not attached to the story itself):

Boxer Targets Fiorina's Palin Tie


Wherein lies my confusion? 1) Boxer, capitalized, does not immediately suggest a particular individual, especially since boxers might commonly be expected to "target" the people they share headlines with, i.e., other boxers; 2) 3 of the 5 words in the headline are proper nouns, two of them effectively modifying the final noun, which is not clearly a noun, and even less clearly an abstract noun; 3) Fiorina has in past news "targeted" Boxer's hair, so some corner of the mind assumes that Boxer's getting snarky about Fiorina's neckwear, presumably festooned with iconic ladies in red; 4) "Palin," as a noun immediately following a possessive, feels like that which belongs to Fiorina until your sort out what the "tie" is; and 5) boxers, as athletes, might be sensed to "tie" other athletes, and "targets" could be a noun, so it's hard to seize the verb.