N-looking

[James Harbeck]

I first encountered this in an article some 15 or 20 years ago, I
think, on the nutria, a rodent from the south that was being touted
as the next super meat. But evidently the market hasn't for the most
part been able to get over the nutria's being, as the person quoted
put it (this is from memory), "a rat-looking thing with orange
teeth." I took that usage -- noun plus "-looking" -- to be a southern
US dialect feature, but I have not since had that confirmed or
disconfirmed.

The phrase "rat-looking thing" gets 775 Google hits. One of them is a
quote from _Family Guy_. 108 of them involve the word "nutria." Most
of them seem not to use a hyphen (i.e., there's a space rather than a
concatenation).

James Harbeck.

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