Melancholy
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In today's Get Fuzzy, Bucky's exploration of English compound-noun semantics continues:
March 29, 2009 @ 8:27 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
« previous post | next post »
In today's Get Fuzzy, Bucky's exploration of English compound-noun semantics continues:
March 29, 2009 @ 8:27 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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Ray Girvan said,
March 29, 2009 @ 9:59 am
Reminds me of the Birmingham greengrocers' inspired name, Melon Cauli.
Aaron Davies said,
March 29, 2009 @ 11:26 am
just out of curiosity, did you deliberately misuse the apostrophe since it's a greengrocer, or are you really considering them plural?
Dan Lufkin said,
March 29, 2009 @ 12:32 pm
Comments are off in the Zippy posting above, so I'll have to announce here that Zippy will no longer appear in The Washington Post's paper edition, just on-line. Hell of a note! Gresham's Law at work again.
sam said,
March 29, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
Why hasn't anyone referenced this yet?
Stephen said,
March 29, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
Is it worth pointing out the allusion to melon farmers? Quick, call Zwicky!
Ray Girvan said,
March 29, 2009 @ 2:40 pm
did you deliberately misuse the apostrophe
To me "greengrocers" has always been singular (i.e. for the shop operated by a greengrocer). Maybe it's a regional thing: for example, see Greengrocers opened:
Ray Girvan said,
March 29, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
PS: Google News – "a greengrocers" – confirms abundantly. I'd never thought about it before.
Robert said,
March 29, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
Melancholy is to do with the four humours, of course, referring to black bile, a body fluid that doesn't seem to exist.
Paul said,
March 29, 2009 @ 3:33 pm
Life, as they say, is butter melon cauliflower.
WindowlessMonad said,
March 29, 2009 @ 5:13 pm
When my daughter was one, we had any number of 2am renditions of 'Come to me, my melon colic baby…'
Terry Hunt said,
March 30, 2009 @ 12:54 am
"Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby" is, of course, the punchline of a shaggy-dog story involving the escape of Dr Frankenstein's early experiment in gourd-dog hybridisation.
Ray Girvan said,
March 30, 2009 @ 8:31 am
gourd-dog hybridisation
Nasty. If that got into the gene pool it could cause widespread mutation, and we'd be melon-collie too.
Bloix said,
March 30, 2009 @ 7:34 pm
In the US, we don't use the word greengrocer, so we don't have any greengrocers. We do, however, have dry cleaning establishments, which we call "cleaners," singular, as in:
My recommendation for a cleaners? Abe's on Broadway. They are awesome, family-owned, and nice as can be.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/uptown-fabricare-cleaners-portland
And that's the only example I can think of.
Joel said,
April 2, 2009 @ 5:23 pm
Stephen: Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmer.
Merri said,
April 10, 2009 @ 7:39 am
Speaking of compounds of Greek origin, would you accept the claim that 'diplomatic' comes from Greek :
diplous = folded, bent up, bowing, two-faced
mataizo = to talk at random
The translations of both components are right, but I think the word in fact comes from 'diplomata' = things folded (documents, in order to remain unseen).