"Re-Grand Opening"
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From John Bell:
I thought of you and your interest in the oddities of linguistic expression a few days ago when I noticed that the local Safeway supermarket had large signs up saying "RE-GRAND OPENING". They had recently done some renovation in a corner of the store — enlarging the self-checkout and the Starbucks counter, so I think that was the impetus for the sign, but I also liked the way it made sure you knew this was not the first GRAND OPENING.
John didn't send a picture, but there are plenty of relevant images Out There, like these:
I'm trying to come up with some other examples of the pattern
<ADJECTIVE> Re-<NOUN>
that can survive as
Re-<ADJECTIVE> <NOUN>.
But my attempts are falling completely flat, like
Next Re-Labelling → *Re-Next Labelling.
Can you do better?
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 29, 2023 @ 11:38 am
Not quite the same, but "Co-executive Producer" seems to follow a similar pattern.
Laura Morland said,
August 29, 2023 @ 11:43 am
Hmmm… I can't think of any in English.
However, in France it's considered to be a terrible faux pas to say "bonjour" to someone more than once a day. The implication is that the first "bonjour" was insincere, that you were paying so little attention that you said it by rote, not really taking note of the other person.
The solution? "Rebonjour!"
"Rebonjour" is often used to begin an email as well (when appropriate).
[Random web page I just found on the topic:
https://blog.rosettastone.com/rebonjour-and-other-ways-to-say-hello-in-french/ ]
Cervantes said,
August 29, 2023 @ 11:48 am
"Grand Reopening" is obviously more grammatical and probably makes more sense.
For "Re-Grand Opening" to be grammatical Grand Opening would have to be one word, and it would have to be a verb. But it's actually a noun phrase. I'm not sure why they were drawn to that awkward form.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
August 29, 2023 @ 11:52 am
@Cervantes — maybe because they didn't close, so they can't "re-open"? I don't know; that's all I've got.
Jenny Chu said,
August 29, 2023 @ 12:02 pm
Marketing English can create some marvelous amusements. I recall receiving a wonderful invitation to the (rather paradoxical, I thought) "Grand Inaugural Opening and 10th Anniversary" celebration.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 29, 2023 @ 12:23 pm
The phrase "new revision" happily coexists with "renew vision," but they don't fit the requested parsing pattern.
KC said,
August 29, 2023 @ 12:44 pm
This happens all the time with "ex-" in headlines.
Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin lost their citizenships but not their posts after their tenures. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ex-chinese+leader%22
(I hate it, but it seems to be the norm. Insert here Al Pacino yelling everyone else is out of order.)
Fernando said,
August 29, 2023 @ 1:03 pm
@cervantes and all: It seems that grand opening IS becoming a word, at least in real estate circles. I often see advertisements like, “such-and-such subdivision grand opens this weekend”. It’s just a small step from there to say that something re-grand opens.
Y said,
August 29, 2023 @ 1:43 pm
@Laura Morland
See also "How do you continue to do", in this skit (at 0:58):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar-B9CK1qOI
John from Cincinnati said,
August 29, 2023 @ 3:03 pm
formal re-reading / re-formal reading
superglue re-joining / re-superglue joining
bigamistic re-marrying / re-bigamistic marrying
leftover re-warming / re-leftover warming
Tried to construct one that uses what my GPS is always telling me: "recalculating". Only came up with "effing".
Suppose you take out a bank loan, using as security the copyright you own to a poem. Later you take out a second loan. Then we have
verse re-mortgage / re-verse mortgage
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 29, 2023 @ 3:09 pm
Apparently "re-IPO" is a thing in the world of corporate finance, but as far as I can discover, nobody ever spells it out as "re-initial public offering".
JPL said,
August 29, 2023 @ 5:26 pm
Laura Moreland has identified the logical form of the situation; in English we would say, "Hello again!"
The expression "re-opening" would refer to the repetition of the opening of the store; since the store had not closed, "grand re-opening" would be inappropriate in this case. The expression "grand opening" would refer to the celebration of the opening of the store, the initial opening. "re-grand opening" then refers to a repetition of the (initial) celebration of the opening of the store. The situation is similar to the distinction between "they remarried" (after a divorce) and "they renewed their vows". (There is continuing relevance of an end-state of a prior transition.)
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 29, 2023 @ 6:20 pm
Most stores close every night and reopen every morning. Unveiling a newly remodeled section of the store arguably makes that day's reopening a bit grander than usual, it seems to me.
Cervantes said,
August 30, 2023 @ 7:45 am
It seems to me that "Re-Grand Opening" still doesn't make sense even if the idea is that the store never actually closed, because that would imply that it can't be opening at all. As Gregory says, the store does in fact reopen every day, this particular instance happens to be grand.
If "grand open" is starting to function as a single word, I suppose that's an understandable process — it saves a couple of words compared to "has its grand opening." But it feels quite awkward to me and I expect to most people. It hasn't made it into the vernacular as yet.
AB said,
August 30, 2023 @ 7:58 am
If a proposal is approved for a second time, has it been re-greenlit, or green-re-lighted or…?
Jerry Packard said,
August 30, 2023 @ 11:09 am
““Re-Grand Opening" to be grammatical Grand Opening would have to be one word, and it would have to be a verb. But it's actually a noun phrase. I'm not sure why they were drawn to that awkward form.”
“It seems that grand opening IS becoming a word, at least in real estate circles. I often see advertisements like, “such-and-such subdivision grand opens this weekend”. It’s just a small step from there to say that something re-grand opens.”
“If "grand open" is starting to function as a single word, I suppose that's an understandable process — it saves a couple of words compared to "has its grand opening." But it feels quite awkward to me and I expect to most people. It hasn't made it into the vernacular as yet.”
These observations stand as evidence of how dynamic our lexicon is and how lexical items are determined by our _construal_ of an item as a word, and how that construal is affected by things such as frequency.
Lance said,
August 30, 2023 @ 2:47 pm
My instinct is that you need something as lexicalized as "grand opening" (at no point when reading about a grand opening do I think, "How grand, I wonder?"). So "bigamist marrying" wouldn't work.
What *would* work is the increasingly antiequated "gay marry", as in the sentence "As soon as it was legal in Massachusetts, my friends Sarah and Emily got gay married". You *could* then say "After her divorce from Sarah, she got re-gay married to her friend Alice" ("…she got gay remarried…" is also plausible, but it feels like it's breaking up a lexical item).
"got re-gay married" gets one Google hit in a clearly jocular context (https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillologycirclejerk/comments/pczyv1/uk_flag_but_it_was_too_complicated_so_i_arranged/hanoigg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), but that's one more than "re-bigamist marrying", so, you know.
JPL said,
August 30, 2023 @ 5:25 pm
Stores sometimes (often?) open for business (for the first time) before the "Grand Opening" celebration (or ceremony). A "re-grand opening" is a celebration (Live Mariachi!), a repetition of the initial celebration (not a repetition of an opening). (Imagine that the ceremony involved a ribbon cutting: you could describe the repetition of that event as a "re-ribbon cutting", but "ribbon re-cutting" would not make sense. There's no problem grammatically; it's just a bracketing problem.)