4 ms·
I always trip on the ability of English has to turn nouns into verbs so after my first parse of the sentence I thought "w.t.f does the verb to planimeter mean?"
by ithkuil 2y ago
I always trip on the ability of English has to turn nouns into verbs so after my first parse of the sentence I thought "w.t.f does the verb to planimeter mean?". Then I realized that "can" is not a verb here....
- lupire 2y agoRight. Coke can can planimeter What's the difference between a piano and a fish? You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoYou can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
- toast0 2y agoI mean, we verb nouns all the time, but this is just a homonym, can and can are different words that sound and spell the same.
- ithkuil 2y agoYes I was referring to the verbing of "planimeter" which wasn't
- HPsquared 2y agoProper capitalization would have made it clearer.
- veloxo 2y ago"Coke can" is a phrasal adjective here and ought to be hyphenated, which removes the ambiguity: "Coke-can planimeter"
- ajb 2y agoI don't think that's mandatory. Noun phrases can be arbitrarily long in English and don't require connecting words or hyphens. This can be very confusing to people whose first language doesn't have this feature. Classic example: "Heathrow airport customer car park", a five word noun phrase (IE, noun noun noun noun noun) that native speakers find completely normal.