Caption on a nature site: "Ruby-_Throat_ Hummingbird"

[Victor Steinbok]

I spontaneously thought of "two-headed" vs. "two-head", but that sounded
contrived. So I checked "three-headed monster" and "three-head monster"
instead: 323K vs. 44K. If you think "one-arm man" is amazing nonsense,
what do you think of "three-head monster"?

     VS-)

On 7/8/2012 12:27 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>> one-arm man
> Amazing! This ought to be nonsense. It's like the mirror-image of the
> name of a cattle-brand, like the "Double-R Bar" of Roy Rogers or Bobby
> Benton's "B-Bar-B." "Doubled-R'ed-Bar" and "B-Barred-B" can make sense
> only if you already know what the brands look like, before hearing
> their names.
>
> Well, if -ed adds nothing to the meaning for you, why would you bother with it?
>
> --
> -Wilson

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