A Clockwork Orange

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 2, 2012, at 2:03 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:

> I always understood "clockwork" to be the modifier and "orange" to be the head, but still pronounced it "a clockwork *orange*". Maybe I was treating it like other food-related compounds, like "apple *pie*" and "strawberry *jam*".
>
> Neal

Or "a Florida orange", "a Valencia orange", "a Jaffa orange", "Macintosh apple", "Empire apple", "New Zealand apple", "Washington State apple", etc., which I pronounce with final stress unless the context is explicitly contrastive. On the other hand, I think I pronounce "navel orange", "juice orange",  "eating apple", etc. with compound stress.  I know this gets complicated ("apple PIE" vs. "APPLE cake", etc.), and I'm not sure what the rules are, for me or anyone else.

LH
>
> On Aug 2, 2012, at 3:29 AM, Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      A Clockwork Orange
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I finally found some time to read A Clockwork Orange, having wanted to for
>> some time, and having seen the movie many times over the decades (it's one
>> of my top five favorite movies).
>>
>> One thing I discovered was that my interpretation of the title, though
>> quite vague, was completely off.  I'd always taken it to have a very
>> strange grammatical structure, with "orange" being a post-head modifier, a
>> bit like "red" in "code red".  I had never been able to give the title real
>> meaning, and assumed it was just a surreal group of words.
>>
>> I don't know why, but it never occurred to me that "clockwork" should
>> modify "orange", maybe because having something so organic be made out of
>> something so inorganic seems to make it semantically empty, I don't know,
>> but I was very surprised to discover in the book that it describes an
>> orange made out of clockwork.  I was equally surprised in discovering that
>> Kubrick had completely ignored this concept in his movie.  It would have
>> only taken a few seconds of monologue to explain it.
>>
>> With this new knowledge, it still bothered me that I had always known the
>> book and movie as "A Clockwork *Orange*", and not "A *Clockwork* Orange" --
>> the accent should be on the modifier.  Was this because I had heard it that
>> way?
>>
>> In this short documentary on the making of the movie, the title is
>> mentioned several times:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHeIYgXq87I&feature=related
>>
>> The first couple times the title is mentioned, it's not so clearly one way
>> or the other, but later:
>>
>> 17:58
>> 18:58
>> 19:48
>> 22:11
>> 23:54+
>>
>> it's very clearly accented on "orange".
>>
>> --
>> Randy Alexander
>> Xiamen, China
>> Blogs:
>> Manchu studies: http://www.sinoglot.com/manchu
>> Chinese characters: http://www.sinoglot.com/yuwen
>> Language in China (group blog): http://www.sinoglot.com/blog
>>
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>
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