[Ads-l] "Noun adjective."

Gordon, Matthew J. GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU
Sun Nov 9 16:39:25 UTC 2014


And Madness's mum was so "house-proud" back in 1982. OED has that back to 1822.

Matt
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Neal Whitman [nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET]
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2014 10:30 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Noun adjective."

And Houston TX was "Houston proud" back in the late 1980s.

Neal

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 9, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Noun adjective."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>> On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Ben Yagoda wrote:
>>
>> From a 10/31 news report:  "Five football players from California University
>> of Pennsylvania were arrested and suspended from the school after police
>> say they beat and stomped a man outside an off-campus restaurant, then fled
>> yelling 'Football strong!'
>>
>> That brought to mind the slogan the city of Boston adopted after the Marathon
>> bombing of 2013: "Boston strong."
>>
>> I also recently learned that the city of Barrett, Pennsylvania, the center
>> of a recent manhunt for an armed fugitive, has taken the motto "Barrett Proud."
>>
>> All this made me wonder if anyone on this list has any insights to the origin,
>> or grammar, of this construction. The most prominent early use I'm aware
>> of is the slogan "Built Ford Tough," which has been around at least since
>> 1986. (http://books.google.com/books?id=_Z0iAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Ford+tough%22)
>
> I wrote about "Boston strong" and its predecessors for the Boston
> Globe and in a followup Word Routes column for Vocabulary.com:
>
> http://b.globe.com/strongbz
> http://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wordroutes/an-army-of-strong-slogans/
>
> As I mention in the Word Routes column, "Built Ford Tough" actually
> goes back to 1976.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=3uEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA26
>
> On the grammar of "N strong", see these Language Log posts on "Army
> strong" (which I discuss in the Globe column):
>
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003903.html
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003906.html
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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