bad hair day

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

Greg Pulliam <pulliam at IIT.EDU> asks:

>>>
I think this is clearly a humor-driven compound, i.e., if one parsing
is really funny, and the other isn't, the funny one is probably
responsible for the spreading of the term.

To that end, I'm still curious as to whether anyone on this list
finds [[bad hair] day] as funny as or funnier than [bad [hair day]].
<<<

I do. I can't make any sense at all out of "hair day", but a "[[bad hair]
[day]]" to me is transparently, literally, a day on which a person is having bad
hair: "My hair is terrible today; I can't do a thing with it!" Thence, directly,
the humorous extension to a day on which *everything* is going wrong for the
person in question. Any characterization of the person zimself is to me
secondary.

-- Mark A. Mandel