zompist bboard

My roommates, who are from New York City, sometimes use a rather strange verb: fucks - as in, that's the base, uninflected form. It only appears after the auxiliary can, as in "I can fucks with that" or "He can fucks with that." Fucks with means "to manage, handle, or work with [something]", clearly distinct from to fuck with [something].

I kept trying to elicit a third-person singular finite form from them, to see if it was fuckses (*He fuckses with that - ??) but they would only produce it with can.

'Fuck with' in that sense is definitely used without the -s in some American dialects - I think AAVE.

I could see myself using fuck around with in that sense.

Maybe not really innovative, but I recently noticed my mom saying didn't wanted.

From MSN:

The gain in Amazon stock' price added nearly $7 billion (£5.3bn) to his wealth overnight

It could just be a random typo, but they appear to be treating the apostrophe as a generic marker of possession, and thinking that "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive (the price of the Amazon stock).

That's pretty common without the apostrophe, at least in headlines. I googled "stock price" just now and found "AMZN Stock Price," "DWDP Stock Price," "BABA Stock Price," "T Stock Price," "PayPal Stock Price"...

Yes, of course, "stock price" is just an ordinary noun, but "stock' price" is innovative.

So then "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive, isn't it?

Salmoneus wrote:thinking that "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive (the price of the Amazon stock).

Isn't that generally true of English inanimate noun juxtapositions (i.e. juxtapositions of English inanimate nouns)?

Pole, the wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:thinking that "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive (the price of the Amazon stock).

Isn't that generally true of English inanimate noun juxtapositions (i.e. juxtapositions of English inanimate nouns)?

No, in English the possessive isn't usually used inside compounds, and a distinction is made between possessive constructions and compounds: for instance, "the stock car" means a different thing from "the stock's car". And the possessive apostrophe isn't usually used except with a suffixed -s. However, it is used by itself, with no following letters and no difference in pronunciation, after some or all (depending on dialect) words ending in /s/, so this could be an extrapolation from that.

Personally, I don't think the distinction between compound nouns and possession in English is a very clear one, but that's probably a matter of debate, and your mileage may vary. EDIT: I also just realized I didn't know what a "stock car" was. EDIT2: In fact, what does "the stock's car" mean?

Pole, the wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:thinking that "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive (the price of the Amazon stock).

Isn't that generally true of English inanimate noun juxtapositions (i.e. juxtapositions of English inanimate nouns)?

Vijay wrote:Personally, I don't think the distinction between compound nouns and possession in English is a very clear one, but that's probably a matter of debate, and your mileage may vary.

Here's my impression.

The typical way -'(s) is used is to turn a noun phrase into a kind of definite determiner/determinative that acts like the single-word possessives "his, her, its, their". E.g. from the noun phrase "the cow" we can make "the cow's", which can be used as a determiner/determinative before the N-bar "horn" to make "[[the cow's] horn]" (= "its horn").

The typical way compound nouns work is that an "N-bar" is (used as an adjunct?) placed before another "N-bar" to form a new "N-bar"; the new N-bar combines with a determiner the same way as any other N-bar to make a noun phrase. E.g. from the "cow" and the N-bar "manure" we make the N-bar "cow manure", which can be preceded by the definite article "the" to make "[the [cow manure]]" (which does not mean "manure of the cow").

That said, -'(s) is sometimes used atypically, in phrases like "[a [women's magazine]" or "[a [children's book]]". In this context, "women's magazine" acts as a N-bar, combining as a unit with the determiner "a", so it could be analyzed as a compound with atypical morphological marking of the first element, or "women's" could be analyzed as an adjunct. However, this construction is not as productive as the construction where the -'(s) possessive is formed from a noun phrase and acts as a determiner/determinative.

Some people even seem to feel unsure about using the apostrophe in these constructions; although it still seems standard to me, you can find discussions on the web where people argue things like "women's" or "children's" are not real "possessives" because they are "acting as adjectives" in this context, so the apostrophe should be omitted: http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/english/2 ... women.html Although I don't agree with the practice of omitting an apostrophe in this context, I think it's evidence that many speakers intuitively feel the difference between these constructions and typical -'(s) constructions—hence the desire to mark it in some way in the orthography.

I don't know German very well, but I know German has an "s" that appears after the first element of some compound words that seems to be historically derived from the genitive-case marker, but synchronically quite distinct from it. https://books.google.com/books?id=gEk0_ ... an&f=false Although this seems more extreme than the situation in English, perhaps they could be compared.

Terms like "possessive" and "genitive" are vague and used differently by different people. Some people use them to refer to all -'(s) constructions; some people use them to refer to those, and also "X of Y" constructions; I don't think I've ever seen them used to refer to "X Y" constructions but I don't know for sure. I don't think of "Amazon stock price" or "bicycle wheel" as possessive constructions.

Salmoneus wrote:From MSN:

The gain in Amazon stock' price added nearly $7 billion (£5.3bn) to his wealth overnight

It could just be a random typo, but they appear to be treating the apostrophe as a generic marker of possession, and thinking that "the Amazon stock price" is a possessive (the price of the Amazon stock).

The original wording as you quote it does not have "the" before "Amazon", although it could be left out for "headlinese" reasons.

It looks like they originally wrote it with 's, and then decided to delete the s and forgot to delete the apostrophe for some reason

Vijay wrote:Personally, I don't think the distinction between compound nouns and possession in English is a very clear one, but that's probably a matter of debate, and your mileage may vary. EDIT: I also just realized I didn't know what a "stock car" was. EDIT2: In fact, what does "the stock's car" mean?

It doesn't cover every case but the way I sometimes explain the distinction is that for example "a car's door" is the door of (currently or formerly attached to) some particular car, whereas "a car door" is a door of the sort generally attached to cars, whether or not the particular door I'm talking about has ever been attached to a car.

(Which is just another way to describe what Sumelic already explained: [a car]'s door vs. a [car door].)

"reoccurring"

Our financial manager just gave an overview of the budget and she must have said this half a dozen times.

What's innovative about that?

Pole, the wrote:What's innovative about that?

Traditionally the word would be "recurring".

But it's a separate word.

Pole, the wrote:But it's a separate word.

Well, it is now, but "reoccur" is a more modern word that's essentially synonymous with "recur", and widely frowned upon as an error. It may be even less accepted in the US, since dictionary.com only has an entry for it in its "British Dictionary".

Also, to the extent that "reoccur" might have different usage from "recur", it probably wouldn't be the appropriate word in this context.


[I might feel more comfortable with "reoccur" when:
- discussing strictly speaking an occurence (the ghost sightings reoccured each full moon?)
- in the sense of something similar occuring in a different place or time (these decorative elements reoccur throughout the region?)
- in the sense of something that has disappeared or ceased entirely before reappearing (mentions of the tribe reoccur in Bolivia, after seven centuries of absence from the historical record?)
But now that the spectre of 'recur' has been raised (I'll admit it took me a second to notice 'reoccur' wasn't the approved form), I'm struggling not to want to put 'recur' into all these cases]

Or, perhaps LB is talking about 'reoccur' replacing some other word? There's not really enough context to say for sure.

Salmoneus wrote:Or, perhaps LB is talking about 'reoccur' replacing some other word? There's not really enough context to say for sure.

No, as I said, it was a talk about budgeting, where collocations like "recurring expenses" qualify as terms of art.

Might be just me, but I primarily associate “recur” with “recurse” and not “reoccur”.

I didn't even know "recurse" was a word until now. It sounds like it means 'to curse again'.

I do not find reoccur to be that notable of an innovation (as I definitely hear it in use). As for recurse, that is a word you would know if you were a programmer.

Travis B. wrote:As for recurse, that is a word you would know if you were a programmer.

Or a mathematician.

Travis B. wrote:I do not find reoccur to be that notable of an innovation (as I definitely hear it in use).

It's not an innovation; the innovative usage as I understand it has to do with the context where it's being used instead of recur, which (if I understand correctly what linguoboy's saying) is more commonly used in the context of budget proposals.