Composite puzzles

From the front page of today’s New York Times, “Diverse Sources Pour Cash Into Taliban’s War Chest” by Eric Schmitt:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations, raising hundred of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations …

A point of linguistic interest is the composite nominal insurgent operations, in particular its first element, insurgent: noun or adjective? It has uses as a noun (OED2 has it from 1765) and uses as an adjective (from 1814 in OED2).

Either is possible. The whole nominal could be a compound noun meaning, roughly, ‘operations by insurgents’, parallel to invader operations:

US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of US invader operations, claimed that two crewmen escaped injury and the helicopter was recovered. (link)

Or the nominal could involve a “non-predicating adjective” insurgent, in a composite with an adjective understood not as predicating some property of the head noun but as evoking some noun — as in electrical engineer (where electricity is evoked) and transformational grammar (where transformation(s) is evoked) — a type of nominal discussed several times on Language Log, for instance here.

What makes things tricky is that if insurgent is a non-predicating adjective in insurgent operations, then the evoked noun is the noun insurgent(s). Whoops.

Short shot #16: Euro-words

In the October 10th Economist there’s a leader (“Wake up Europe!”, p. 13), on current events in the European Union, with some nice Euro- words in it:

[on the EU constitution] Some Eurosceptics want to fight on, hoping that a Tory victory in Britain could mean a new referendum.

[on the presidency of the EU] One could imagine, say, Angela Merkel sitting down as an equal with Presidents Obama and Hu; but she has another job. So the choice is the usual Europygmies or Tony Blair …

Neither word is brand-new. Euroscepticism and Eurosceptic have been around long enough for the first to get a Wikipedia page (where you can also find Europhilia). The Economist seems to be especially fond of Europygmy, but others have used it, since at least 2002.

(Spelling varies on these words. You can find Europygmies, Euro pygmies, and europygmies, and similarly for the others.)

Euro- words get their first element from the word Europe, and their second element is usually a free-standing word (as in Europygmy), though sometimes it’s a combining form (like -phile) or an element extracted from a larger word (like the vision of Eurovision, extracted from television). These words then often look like portmanteaus in their origin, but in any case act like compounds morphologically.

Michael Quinion’s Ologies and Isms has an entry for Euro-, with more details (including some items with the variant Eur-) . What it doesn’t say is that Euro-words have two accent patterns, differing in which of the two parts has the heavier accent: the first in Eurovision and Europhile, the second in Eurocommunism and Eurocentric. (Alternative accent patterns are well-known for many types of compounds.) I suspect that some people vary in their treatment of certain specific words, but I haven’t looked at the matter in any detail, nor have I examined the factors that are relevant to the choice of one pattern or the other.

More sexual back-formations

Having stumbled into a discussion of the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in several senses) and the back-formed verb to shirt-lift historically derived from them, I was moved to explore some other possible sexual back-formations. Given cock-sucking and cock-sucker, had people invented a back-formed verb to cock-suck (however spelled)?

The answer is: yes, big time.

Lifting shirts

A little while back I made up some notecards using an ad from 10percent.com (reproduced below), adding the caption:

ABS Show
A few of the guys weren’t
Into shirt-lifting.

The ad shows various degrees of lifting shirts in front, to display the male torso, especially the guys’ “six-packs” (the abs, that is, abdominal muscles). It celebrates fitness, and homoeroticism as well.

Linguistic point here: the synthetic compound shirt-lifting, which turns out to have two families of senses, only one of them illustrated  by the ad. There’s also a synthetic compound shirt-lifter, with two families of senses; the guys in the ad are shirt-lifters in one sense, but not (necessarily) in the other.

And then, of course, from shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter, we get a back-formed compound verb to shirt-lift, again with two families of senses.

Eve-teasing

On the front page of the NYT on September 16, the story “On India’s Railways, Women Find New Peace in the Commute” (by Jim Yardley), about a pilot program introducing commuter trains exclusively for female passengers — “Ladies Specials” in India’s four largest cities. These trains give women respite from public harassment by men, a practice known as eve-teasing (also spelled Eve-teasing or eve teasing or Eve teasing).

There’s a lot to dislike in the euphemism eve teasing. Teasing is a mild term indeed for aggressive insulting, catcalling, groping, and the like. And the reference to the biblical Eve deflects the offense from the perpetrators by suggesting that the objects of the offense are temptresses. So it’s “just fun”, and anyway, they bring it on themselves — attitudes that the women in question most definitely do not share.

The term originates in Indian English, and the practice is widespread in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It’s generally believed that the incidence of eve-teasing has dramatically increased as women appeared in increasing numbers in universities and in the work force and, generally, as independent actors in public life. And its appearance in movies and music videos (where it’s often framed as an overture to romance) has probably fostered its spread in real life.

The OED (draft entry of March 2006) has cites for the synthetic compounds eve-teasing and eve-teaser from 1960 (from a single issue of the Times). Many early cites have the words in quotation marks, suggesting that they had only recently come into widespread use.

So the synthetic compounds have been around for some time, and we can wonder if they’ve gone down the path to back-formation, of a verb to eve-tease. The verb is here:

Sanjay said that he passes comments at girls to please them, for Subash it was to get attention from the opposite sex whereas for Manish … it is just fun and it remains fun only when he gets to eve tease from a distance, like when he is on a bus or when he has a group of friends. (link) [from Nepal]

Me or my brother always had to accompany my sisters to the grocery shops because there was a particular stretch where the guys loitering around would try to eve tease my sisters…. (link) [from India]

Rawalpindi cops enjoy watching women being eve-teased (link) [from Bangladesh]

Girl commits suicide after being eve teased (link) [from India]

Feel-copping

For the annals of synthetic compounds, this item from Joe Clark:

Man-pat and side-squeeze no match for teenage feel-copping

with a link to a Toronto Star story of September 12 (“For teenagers, body-to-body contact says it all”) about teenage fashions in hugging and the like: the side-squeeze, the surprise hug, the boyfriend-girlfriend hug, and the male-to-male non-hug the man-pat. There is some concern about kids crossing the line into sexually inappropriate contact, which is where feel-copping comes into it.

Meme hybrid alert

Although in my posting on portmanteaus I declared that I wasn’t collecting them — there are just too many, and new ones are invented every day — here’s what I think is an interesting new one, from Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Magazine piece (of August 23) “The Feminist Hawks”:

Like many conservatives, [David] Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Now memebrid is a portmanteau, a kind of hybrid, but the memebrid in question, feminist hawk ‘hawk who is a feminist’, is not. Instead, it’s an instance of a different scheme for combining two words to make a new word: compounding. (The OED entry for portmanteau makes the connection between the two phenomena explicit.) A compound has a dual nature: it is a word, but it also consists of two words in sequence; it has an internal structure.

In some portmanteaus, one of the contributing words appears intact (and the other appears only in abbreviated form); this is the case for memebrid, where meme appears intact, while hybrid is shortened to -brid. But many portmanteaus — brunch, spork — have both contributing words abbreviated (br- + -unch, sp- + -ork).

Still other portmanteaus have both contributors intact, but overlapping: bromance is bro + romance, with -ro- shared (in pronunciation and in spelling); the corresponding compound would be bro romance. In fact, there’s often overlapping in portmanteaus in general: Billary is Bill + Hillary, with shared -ill-; Scalito is Scalia + Alito, with shared -ali-. (Overlapping is a property these portmanteaus have in common with one large class of inadvertent blends, called “splice blends” in the literature: originary is original + ordinary, with shared -in-.)

No overlapping in memebrid, however.

Short shot #8: more on grow

Following up on my recent posting on the noun grow … Danny Bloom has pointed me to some material that suggests a different route to it than simple nouning.

It turns out that there are plenty of hits for marijuana grow operation (and some for marijuana grow-op), and even more for marijuana growing operation (and some for marijuana growing op). These expressions are used to refer to both outdoor and indoor operations, but, crucially, they’re primarily to refer to the enterprises in question, and only secondarily (if at all) to the places where these enterprises are carried on.

Start with the fullest and most standard variant:

Officers in San Francisco uncovered a marijuana growing operation in a home in the city’s Sunset District on Wednesday afternoon. (link)

Then, clip growing to grow:

Federal and local law enforcement agents confiscated roughly 30000 marijuana plants growing among pine trees in the Pike National Forest. (link)

Then clip operation to op, either with growing:

Marijuana growing op in Miami mall storage area busted (link)

or with grow:

300-plant marijuana grow-op busted in North Van forest (link)

Then it’s just a step to marijuana grow on its own, with various senses having to do with pot growing (and of course to grow on its own, with the domain understood from context):

Tribal police raid Mexican marijuana grow site (link)

Washington’s Cannabis Eradication Response Team members raid a marijuana grow near Harrah, Wash. (link)

Record marijuana grow pulled up by the roots in Siskiyou County (link)

There are hits for parallel expressions with pot or cannabis rather than marijuana in them, but my task here is not to survey all possible expressions in this domain.

X number

I posted yesterday on Language Log about Erdős numbers, and then paused to note that composites of the form X number come in at least two varieties, exemplified by Erdős number vs. Fibonacci number (both with nouns as their first element) and by lucky number vs. triangular number (both with adjectives as their first element). I’ll focus here on the slightly less complex N + number case.

Both Erdős number and Fibonacci number have the semantics ‘number associated in some way with N’, but  Erdős number has an additional component of meaning lacking in Fibonacci number, evoking another referent besides Paul Erdős — someone who has this number. That is, Erdős number is “inalienably possessed”, and in normal usage requires that an explicit possessor be expressed (“My Erdős number is 4″). For Fibonacci number, in contrast, there’s no such requirement (I do not have a Fibonacci number associated with me). Similarly, lucky number vs. triangular number.

Inalienable possession is a huge and much-studied topic in semantics, syntax, and morphology. In some languages, there are explicit morphosyntactic indications of inalienable possession, but English is not such a language. Languages also differ in which nouns are inalienably possessed; body-part terms (like hand) and kin terms (like sister) are especially likely to be inalienably possessed (as they normally are in English).

Searching on {“your * number”} pulls up some entertaining inalienable N + number compounds: your birth number (known under various other names), a one-digit number calculated from birth year, month, and day and used to predict personality characteristics and the like (think of it as a zodiac with only nine signs); your sex number (the number of sexual partners you’ve had); and your fuck number (for men, the number of strokes it takes until you reach orgasm), for instance.

Regional countries

Caught in a public radio news report about Afghanistan this morning, a reference to “three regional countries”, meaning ‘three countries in the region [that Afghanistan is in]‘. Not a remarkable example of a non-predicating adjective (latest discussion here) — of a type that is interpreted much like a noun, so that regional country is parallel to area country ‘country in the area’. There is, however some interest in the question of how the region (or area) is identified from context.