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Goobers

July 11, 2012 By Michael O'Hare

The universal English convention for adjective-noun compounds is to put the adjective first: hardware, nightstand, firefighter, etc.  Arachis hypogaea is a nut-like pea (or bean), not a nut of any kind, even though its growth habit is bizarre if not goofy.  Its correct English name, and I trust the extended RBC family will use it henceforth, is therefore nutpea.

You may now go back to whatever you were doing a moment ago.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Language and usage, Woolgathering

Comments

  1. Evan Harper says

    July 11, 2012 at 4:44 am

    Anyone who tries to put a noun in front of an adjective like that ought to be court-martialed by the Solicitor General.

    • Michael O'Hare says

      July 11, 2012 at 7:27 am

      The heterodoxy of those two-word exceptions are highlighted by (i) the awkwardness of pluralizing them properly (ii) something Kleiman explained a while back: a major outranks a lieutenant, but a lieutenant general is higher than a major general because the latter, originally sergeant-major general, was shortened as though the noun was where it belonged; linguistic instinct overpowering meaning.

      Now, let’s clean up those horrid Greek-Latin mongrels and say dicycle, and autokino (or ipsomobile)!

      • marcel says

        July 11, 2012 at 8:56 am

        Perhaps the source of all the jokes about and antagonism toward mothers-in-law is just the clumsiness of the construction.

  2. Bev M says

    July 11, 2012 at 4:50 am

    Thank you, I needed that!

  3. Ken Rhodes says

    July 11, 2012 at 5:48 am

    So nutpea butter should be called goobergoo.

  4. Byomtov says

    July 11, 2012 at 6:01 am

    You may now go back to whatever you were doing a moment ago.

    Impossible. I will now spend the entire day trying to think of a counterexample – you know, what they have in the kitchen remodelling store.

  5. Ed Whitney says

    July 11, 2012 at 7:43 am

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vf8N6GpdM&feature=related

    shows that grammar is very important.

    • Dan D says

      July 12, 2012 at 12:03 pm

      What a great video.

      • Ed Whitney says

        July 12, 2012 at 6:44 pm

        DO YOU THINK YOU CAN TRICK ME LIKE THAT, SCHWEINHUND??! DO YOU REALLY THINK I WILL NOT RECOGNIZE A SENTENCE FRAGMENT WHEN I SEE ONE????

  6. NickT says

    July 11, 2012 at 8:01 am

    Let us, for all love, not quarrel over a kakonymous legume. As Stephen Maturin might have said.

  7. NCG says

    July 11, 2012 at 10:07 am

    Wait, so everyone else here already knew that nutpeas aren’t really nuts? I know y’all are smart, but I have to call b.s.

    Besides, they really do *seem* more like nuts. So there.

  8. Davis X. Machina says

    July 11, 2012 at 12:21 pm

    Not when the adjective is one of size. In my stove I burn a mix of pea coal and nut cole. Horseradish root is bigger than normal radishes. Horseflies, ditto, though that’s ambiguous.

    • Michael O'Hare says

      July 11, 2012 at 1:29 pm

      Why would you burn nut cole instead of eating it? Never heard of that one specifically, but all the brassicas are very healthy, and yummy unless you’re one of the genetic unfortunates who can taste the yucky ingredient in Brussels sprouts…

      • Dennis says

        July 11, 2012 at 6:23 pm

        The Brussels sprout thing raises a question: if P. Bosland can win an Ignoble Prize for breeding a heatless jalapeno, why can’t someone breed the yuck factor out of Brussels sprouts?

        • CharlesWT says

          July 11, 2012 at 6:36 pm

          Or breed the yuck factor taste sense out of humans.

  9. ShadowFox says

    July 11, 2012 at 4:15 pm

    This would have been a sensible concern, perhaps, had Michael not mangled the premise. In fact, there is no adjective in two of the three original pairs — fire-fighter and night-stand are two-noun combinations, much like pea-nut. Whereas an adjective-noun combination would certainly have been asymmetric, resulting, as MOH postulates in combinations that are formed in a particular order, the case is less clear when a compound involves two nouns.

    • Ed Whitney says

      July 11, 2012 at 6:16 pm

      I think that Michael meant to say “modifier” rather than “adjective.” The noun “night” acts as a modifier of “stand.”

      Vee Nazis are very particular about grammar.

      • Michael O'Hare says

        July 11, 2012 at 10:52 pm

        What Eli said. Hotplate combines a plain adj with a n. Tinplate adjectivizes tin; modifier is the right word.

        • sal magundi says

          July 12, 2012 at 1:41 pm

          in the business we call this an appositive: a noun which ‘modifies’ another noun
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition

          • NickT says

            July 12, 2012 at 6:14 pm

            In fact, this sort of noun modifying noun compound is pretty standard fare in any Indo-European language. You should try Sanskrit some time, if you want the most magnificent and florid examples.

  10. Ed Whitney says

    July 11, 2012 at 8:07 pm

    When there are strings of three words, the modifiers and the modified become unpredictable by rules of grammar and have to be determined by context and knowledge of the subject matter.

    A large hadron collider is a large collider of hadrons, not a collider of large hadrons.

    A large animal veterinarian is a veterinarian of large animals, not (usually) a large veterinarian of animals. No doubt size and strength are an asset, though, when dealing with steers and horses.

    • Benjamin says

      July 12, 2012 at 8:37 am

      Hyphens are cheap and in plentiful supply. Feel free to take some home in a doggy bag.

      • Ed Whitney says

        July 12, 2012 at 9:14 am

        They were %1.79 apiece at Office Depot the other day. Where can you get them cheaper?

      • Ed Whitney says

        July 12, 2012 at 11:36 am

        That was supposed to be $1.79 apiece. I had to run out and get some dollar signs which were on sale at Staples this week.

        • Byomtov says

          July 12, 2012 at 12:50 pm

          And you can thank Bain and Mitt Romney for that bargain.

      • Ed Whitney says

        July 12, 2012 at 12:03 pm

        Some of these words, it seems, once took a hyphen, but the use of hyphens is not the same today (or, as they used to say, to-day) as in former days. I think that constructions like night-stand were common at one time. And the hyphen could make a difference in fundamental meaning. “One-night stand” was not at all the same as “one night-stand.”

        Who else remembers hyphenated constructions having declined in use over the course of time?

        • John G says

          July 12, 2012 at 3:55 pm

          no question about it. Everyone used to write ‘e-mail’ but I claim – based on my own experience – that the trend is to ’email’. Lots of other examples would occur to someone less lazy than I.

    • John G says

      July 12, 2012 at 4:01 pm

      In this classic (satire of a) judicial decision, the judge dealt with just such an argument:

      “Counsel finally submits that the word “small” in the title Small Birds Act refers not to “Birds”
      but to “Act”, making it The Small Act relating to Birds. With respect, counsel did not do his
      homework very well, for the Large Birds Act, R.S.O. 1960, c. 725 is just as small. If pressed, I
      need only refer to the Small Loans Act, R.S.O. 1960, c. 727 which is twice as large as the Large
      Birds Act.”

      The whole thing is worth reading: http://www.law.indiana.edu/instruction/lrw/common/Ojibway.pdf. (Author was Hart Pomerantz, a Toronto lawyer and comedian.)

  11. Betsy says

    July 11, 2012 at 9:06 pm

    Speaking of edibles, everyone knows that some vegetables (culturally) are really fruits (botanically), such as tomatoes, corn, zucchini, etc. (Other vegetables really are vegetables, meaning, non-fruit parts of plats — roots, stems, seeds, and buds – such as asparagus, spinach, beets, etc.)

    But there is one fruit that’s really a vegetable. What is it?

    • Michael O'Hare says

      July 11, 2012 at 11:04 pm

      Rhubarb

      • Betsy says

        July 12, 2012 at 9:57 am

        +1 !

    • Byomtov says

      July 12, 2012 at 12:49 pm

      What is the botanical definition of a vegetable? I always thought it simply meant an edible part of a plant, hence included fruit.

      • Ed Whitney says

        July 12, 2012 at 8:36 pm

        My old dictionary of biology has gone missing, but other dictionaries basically define a vegetable as a cultivated non-woody plant grown for food. This means plants whose upper parts die back to the rootstock after the growing season has passed. You can specify if you like that the consuming takes place during the main meal and not as dessert, but of course rhubarb pie is an exception.

        Or, as my very first dictionary, “A Hole is to Dig” said, “Mashed potatoes are so everyone can have enough.”

  12. James Wimberley says

    July 12, 2012 at 6:16 am

    How did the sea cucumber get its name? It’s basically a marine slug.

    • Byomtov says

      July 12, 2012 at 12:46 pm

      Maybe they taste good pickled.

    • etv13 says

      July 12, 2012 at 3:18 pm

      Well, the sea anemone isn’t a flower, and the sea star isn’t a giant glowing ball of gas powered by fusion, so why pick on the sea cucumber? Have you ever touched one? They are really silky soft.

  13. SamChevre says

    July 12, 2012 at 6:19 am

    I will suggest that if the adjective-noun construction is followed, there is already a name (YouTube link) for Arachis hypogaea meeting this standard, appearing in shortened form in the title.

  14. Mrs Tilton says

    July 12, 2012 at 1:24 pm

    See, this is what delights me about the Turkish that I am (slowly, desultorily, badly) learning. Turkish is rigorously logical and regular. It’s not utterly and invariably regular; it’s not Esperanto. But even its irregularities are, for the most part, irregular in highly regular ways.

    There’d never be a need for this sort of thread in Turkish. If Y follows X, then X modifies Y, no arguments, full stop. If the Turkish for peanut were a calque of “peanut”, you may rest assured that it would be the equivalent of nutpea. As it happens, though, it’s a calque of the other English word for the plant, “groundnut”: yerfıstığı. Yer is (here) ground; fıstık is nut; the -ı at the end is a sort of reverse genitive that brings the second word into association with the first; and the -k- turning into a -ÄŸ- when it falls between vowels is one of those highly regular irregularities I mentioned.

    (Also, fıstık only means nut for a few sorts of nut, other sorts having quite separate and unrelated names of their own, and is so far as I can tell normally used only in compound or combination, so yerfıstığı for the peanut or Antep fıstığı, or Antep nut, for the pistachio. It’s a highly regular language; it’s not a simple language.)

  15. jwg says

    July 12, 2012 at 9:31 pm

    I think this bruhaha is similar to the fruit/vegetable one. Yes, a “fruit” is the ripened ovary of a flower, botanically speaking, but most people don’t speak about food botanically, but rather in culinary terms. Generally speaking, we eat, say, zucchini like other vegetables, with salty and savor flavors, not juiced or sweatened. So even though it’s botanically a fruit, in western cooking at least, we usually eat it as a vegetable.

    Similarly, a “peanut” is botanically speaking a pea, but, for the most part, in the West, we don’t eat them like we eat peas (but see the Southern delicacy of hot boiled peanuts). In their whole state, they are prepared and eaten as nuts, often along side them. That is, they are roasted and salted and eaten out of hand or backed into sweet goods. Culinarily, people think of them as nuts, and so the pea means “pea-like” and modifies “nut.”

  16. jwg says

    July 12, 2012 at 9:32 pm

    I think this brouhaha is similar to the fruit/vegetable one. Yes, a “fruit” is the ripened ovary of a flower, botanically speaking, but most people don’t speak about food botanically, but rather in culinary terms. Generally speaking, we eat, say, zucchini like other vegetables, with salty and savor flavors, not juiced or sweatened. So even though it’s botanically a fruit, in western cooking at least, we usually eat it as a vegetable.

    Similarly, a “peanut” is botanically speaking a pea, but, for the most part, in the West, we don’t eat them like we eat peas (but see the Southern delicacy of hot boiled peanuts). In their whole state, they are prepared and eaten as nuts, often along side them. That is, they are roasted and salted and eaten out of hand or backed into sweet goods. Culinarily, people think of them as nuts, and so the pea means “pea-like” and modifies “nut.”

  17. Bloix says

    July 12, 2012 at 10:22 pm

    First of all, neither pea nor nut is an adjective (nor are night, stand, fire, or fighter). They are all nouns.

    As for peanut, it’s a nut that grows like a pea, in a pod. Yes, botanically it’s a legume, not a nut – just as a tomato, botanically is a fruit. But from a culinary standpoint, a peanut is a nut, and that is why the word is what it is.

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