the rare

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 1, 2011, at 12:54 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> Arnold Zwicky recently posted on nouning of adjectives on his blog. Here's an addition recent example that does not fall into one of the previously described categories.
>
> The headline is "Opinion: When to hunt the rare", which refers to the question of possible benefits of hunting of endangered or otherwise protected species. I suppose, one could just blame it on the headline stub.

this is a well-known construction in which "the Adj" serves as a generic plural NP, with roughly the meaning 'Adj things/people'.  it's so productive that even large dictionaries (like the OED) list only a few of these Adj uses.

arnold

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