Syntactic blends

[Gerald Cohen]

At 8:10 AM -0400 10/6/03, James A. Landau wrote:
>A couple of days ago there was a newspaper story (unfortunately I did not
>keep it) about a bear that had been raiding David Letterman's
>country home.  The bear was caught and transported a considerable
>distance in hopes that it would "den up" and not return to David
>Letterman's neighborhood.
>
>Would "den up" be a syntactic blend, from "den" + perhaps "build up"?


I do not see this as a syntactic blend. The two original components
of a syntactic blend should be synonymous or nearly so, e.g. "The
kids are driving me up the crazy" (I heard this once) from "The kids
are driving me crazy" and "The kids are driving me up the wall." An
example from the standard language: "time and again" from "time after
time" and "again and again."

Gerald Cohen
formerly avid collector of syntactic blends