Instances of unmodified hair-day

[Fred Shapiro]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000 Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:

> Well, at least for the authors of the first two articles parsing the
> phrase that way when they heard it. (I'm assuming that Jane Pauley is
> being interviewed in the second, and that the punctuation is the
> writer's.) So there is evidence that some people parsed it as [Adj
> [hair day]] in '90 and '91. The third quotation, of course, is neutral
> on bracketing.

I wonder if in the natural sciences the people presenting actual evidence
are dismissed so cavalierly by the people operating solely on intuition.
I don't think "great hair day" is neutral on bracketing; if there was
evidence of people saying "satisfying hair day," would you analyze this as
'satisfying hair' + day?


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2