guy candy

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:53:34 -0400, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>At 9:53 AM -0700 6/12/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>noticed on the cover of the February 2005 issue of Out magazine:
>>   Swimsuit Special
>>   22 pages of guy candy
>>
>>a play on "eye candy" (which we've mentioned here before), of
>>course.  but how current is it?  modestly so, it turns out.
>>Cosmopolitan has had a "guy candy gallery" feature for some time (so
>>sue me, i tend to look at harder stuff than Cosmo guys), it turns
>>out, and might even have been the source from which the expression
>>spread -- to the monthly guy candy feature on www.musclemayhem.com
>>and various photo albums of male models, for instance.
>>
>
>Notice the different semantic composition structure for "eye candy"
>and "guy candy"; the latter may get erroneously parsed as
>"[metaphorical] candy for guys" (where "candy" suggests 'tasty but
>not necessarily good for you in the long run'), where "guy" is the
>goal rather than the theme argument, although a candy spread
>involving males and featured in Cosmo makes this a relatively
>unlikely reading.

Cf. "boy toy", parsed as either "a toy for boys" or "a boy used as a toy".



--Ben Zimmer