molest, n.

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Jun 28 01:03:09 UTC 2011


At 12:12 AM +0000 6/28/11, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>I'm wondering, though, whether legal parlance has a distinctive
>tendency to nominalize words, whether by clipping or plain function
>shift.  In Georgia, at least, there is a crime named "drunk and
>disorderly" (not "drunkenness and disorder"):  "He was charged with
>drunk and disorderly last night."

And many many (if not as many as the "about 52,700" Google claims)
hits for "drunken disorderly" (or "drunken, disorderly"), most of
which do not involve deliberate puns like The Drunken Disorderly Inn.

LH

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