Re:Soda-Can Planimeter
by ithkuil on Saturday May 25, 2024 @10:45AM
(#40475358)
I always trip on the ability of English has to turn nouns into verbs so after my first parse of the sentence I thought "w.t.f does the verb to planimeter mean?". Then I realized that "can" is not a verb here....
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I mean, we verb nouns all the time, but this is just a homonym, can and can are different words that sound and spell the same.
Yes I was referring to the verbing of "planimeter" which wasn't
Right. Coke can can planimeter
What's the difference between a piano and a fish?
You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.
Re:Soda-Can Planimeter
by rahimnathwani on Saturday May 25, 2024 @01:07PM
(#40476318)
You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.Proper capitalization would have made it clearer.
"Coke can" is a phrasal adjective here and ought to be hyphenated, which removes the ambiguity: "Coke-can planimeter"
I don't think that's mandatory.
Noun phrases can be arbitrarily long in English and don't require connecting words or hyphens. This can be very confusing to people whose first language doesn't have this feature. Classic example: "Heathrow airport customer car park", a five word noun phrase (IE, noun noun noun noun noun) that native speakers find completely normal.