A Clockwork Orange

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 2, 2012, at 11:51 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: A Clockwork Orange
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
>>>
>>> ... 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

among the exceptions to Forestress in Compounds is the subrule having to do with N + N combinations in which N1 denotes the *material* of which N2 is made ("bead curtain", "lead casket", etc.) -- where afterstress is the (possible inviolable) rule.  as here.

(*source* compounds, in which N2 is made with N1, are much more variable.  more discussion in

http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/forestress-and-afterstress.pdf )

in any case "clockwork ORANGE" is just what you'd expect if the orange is made of clockwork.

arnold

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