N-looking

Wed Jan 28 14:24:39 UTC 2009

Thanks for the powerful support, Wilson.  My impression (which will you get
you a cup of supermarket coffee if you add a buck-fifty and tax) is,
however, that such uses are indeed becoming more common.  Certainly in my
experience they have been rare in print, except in very colloquial dialogue.

There's also the question of distribution.  "Some hippie-looking guy" sounds
100% normal to me, but "He was kind of hippie-looking" only about 90%.  Same
for "A lizard-looking alien" vs. "The alien was lizard-looking."

Single-syllable nouns sound stranger, though real-world experience plays a
role: "A fish-looking alien" sounds a little less strange (because pop
culture has prepared us for fishy space-guys and -gals) than "Some
fish-looking guy" or "Some fish-looking buffalo," which is harder to
imagine.

The acceptability level may have something to do with how easy it would have
been to use an adjective instead, specifically one ending in -y or in -like.

In Wilson's example, "King-Kongy" strikes me as nearly (though not quite)
impossible, and "King-Kong-like" pedantic. Both, BTW, would be less precise,
which is probably one good reason why the construction first appeared and
continues to spread.

JL
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: N-looking
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm with you, Jon. Formations of this type can be heard hundreds of
> times in, e.g. barbershops, in certain neighborhoods. "Ugly,
> King-Kong-looking stud" is one that I recall from grade school in the
> 'Forties. At the time, I thought that it was perhaps the
> slide-splittingly-funniest thing that I'd ever heard.
>
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: N-looking
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Of course I can't swear, but I strongly, strongly believe that this
> > construction (e.g., "some hippie-looking guy") has been in my rulebook
> for
> > forty years if not longer.
> >
> > I've often used it - in speech - for its informal effect.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
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> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject:      Re: N-looking
> >>
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> Here are five examples. These are not easy to find and each represents
> >> 100-200 similar occurrences. It took me about fifteen minutes to set up
> >> a filter selective enough to ignore most other combinations. But if you
> >> look for preselected combinations "N1 looking N2", it might be easier to
> >> find some specific examples [where N1 is something that could plausibly
> >> serve as a target (e.g., an animal or a type of individual, such as
> >> bodyguard or janitor) and N2 is one of simple human descriptors, such as
> >> man, woman, boy, girl, guy, girlfriend, etc.].
> >>
> >> The first three below were found using general filters eliminating
> >> "looking P" combinations. The last two were found looking for more
> >> specific patterns.
> >>
> >> VS-)
> >>
> >> http://www.traffictechnologytoday.com/news.php?NewsID=10370
> >> _Animal-looking cars could cut road deaths_
> >>
> >> Road safety campaigners could cut the road death rate by lobbying for
> >> cars to be made to look more like animals, claim researchers.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6dbfi/creepy_angel_of_death_looking_sculpture_in_new/
> >> Creepy _Angel of Death looking_ sculpture in New Orleans' Louis
> >> Armstrong Airport [linked to
> http://www.flymsy.com/images/flying_man.jpg]
> >>
> >> http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/wet_cat.htm
> >> A Wet Cat Looking Creature
> >> [should be "A wet, cat-looking creature"]
> >>
> >> http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=20628433
> >> Is that the dumb MMO that you see in commercials where this dog looking
> >> guy is throwing pies???
> >>
> >> http://www.arellanes.com/archives/000481.html
> >> I saw Pavel Telic(ka, the newly-confirmed EU Commissioner for Health and
> >> Consumer Affairs. He was chatting with a guy in a hockey jersey and with
> >> another bodyguard-looking guy, trying to ignore a drunk who was
> >> teetering dangerously close.
> >>
> >>
> >> Mark Mandel wrote:
> >> > I think of the construction "___-looking" as taking only adjectives,
> >> > not nouns. I don't recall seeing "N-looking" before this item:
> >> >
> >> > Ancestor For All Animals Identified
> >> > http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/01/27/animal-ancestor.html
> >> >
> >> > A sperm-looking creature called monosiga is the closest living
> >> > surrogate to the ancestor of all animals, according to new research
> >> > that also determined animal evolution may not always follow a
> >> > trajectory from simple to complex.
> >> >
> >> > Mark Mandel
> >> >
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