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

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 8, 2012, at 8:50 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> 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-)

Maybe people are confusing "Three Dog Night" with Cerberus, the three-headed Hades-guarding dog, now mostly known as the original of Kerberos, the computer network authentication protocol, not to mention Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, not to be confused with the Styx, or with the four-heart bid in bridge, and they end up with "three-head dog" and other monsters.

LH

>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org