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I saw some good examples of noun-noun compounds recently in the London Underground on these advertisements for a fitness club:

According to Wikipedia, “Bingo wings is a slang term used to describe the build-up of fat and/or extra skin that hangs from the underside of the upper arms. It occurs most frequently in elderly ladies and overweight people. The term apparently originated from the bingo hall custom of raising one’s arm aloft and bellowing “House!”. This ties in due to bingo long being the entertainment of choice for large numbers of elderly ladies, especially in the United Kingdom.”

The descriptive Muffin top is a new one to me so I am surprised that it also has its own entry on Wikipedia. Judging by a Google search, it seems that the term is not as established as the more common Love handles.

“Love handles” → Approx. 1 million Google hits
“Muffin top” → Approx. 0.3 million Google hits

I have heard the term Jelly Belly before in the above context but associate it more with the female anatomy. It is also the name of a Californian Jelly Bean manufacturer. When refering to an over-sized male abdomen, it may be more common to talk about a Beer belly or a Beer gut.

“Jelly belly” → Approx. 1.5 million Google hits
“Beer belly” → Approx. 0.5 million Google hits
“Beer gut” → Approx. 0.2 million Google hits

(NB This demonstrates a disadvantage of using Google to investigate word frequencies - I would imagine that the majority of the ‘Jelly Belly’ hits result from the fact that the term is a trade name. In other words, the results will be referring to confectionary rather than body parts.)

Finally, Moobs is a bit different from the rest. Like the others, it consists of two nouns (Man + boobs). But unlike the others, these two words have become fused together. Sometimes words like this are called Portmanteaus. Some well-known examples of such words include:

• Brunch (breakfast + lunch)
• Motel (motor + hotel)
• Boxercise (boxing + exercise)
• Emoticon (emotion + icon)
• Wikipedia (wiki + encyclopedia)

This is the first time I have ever seen the term Moobs. Perhaps more familiar to me are Man Boobs (that doesn’t mean that I have a pair). The results of a Google fight would suggest that Man boobs are more common than Moobs.

Moobs → Approx. 0.3 million Google hits
“Man boobs” → Approx 0.8 million Google hits

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I heard about man bras on the news a couple of months ago. You would assume that these have been designed for men with moobs. But judging from the advert below, this is not the case:

In order to clarify things, I would suggest that the company adopts the following slogan:

“You don’t need moobs for a man bra.”

I wonder if that model knew what he was getting involved in.

Just spent a few days at my parent’s home in Scotland. I found this buried in a drawer - an old photocopy of a Christmas card that I made when I was about eight years old.

This was my entry for the annual school Christmas card design - a very prestigious competition I seem to remember.

The lucky winner would receive 50 sweet-smelling, purple-inked photocopies of their own Christmas card. My card came second (in the whole school don’t forget!) and I received 30 copies.

I remember a lot of favourable comments being made about the drawing. My teacher in particular seemed to think that, considering my age, the Santa Claus figure demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation for form. At the next parent’s evening, he told my mum and dad that a possible future in art or design lay ahead for me.

The praise must have gone to my head. Very quickly, I managed to convince myself that the picture was my own - that I hadn’t just copied it out of one of my favourite books.

The plagairised drawing:

“We are currently witnessing the worst credit crunch the world has ever seen since the term was invented last year.”

I heard someone saying that on the radio a couple of weeks ago and it made me laugh. It also made we wonder when the term really did come into existence.

I can’t find anything online about its origin but a search of the Guardian archives shows that it was used as early as 1992:

Perhaps early uses of the noun-noun collocation came from poetic journalists and then it became a familiar homehold term when the need arose.

The term, Credit Crunch, is a great example of a self-explaining compound. These are associations between words, especially nouns, whose meaning in combination is different to the individual words themselves. For example:

• Leap year
• Carbon footprint
• Couch potato
• Traffic jam
• Belly button
• Soap opera
• One-hit wonder

Old English had a much smaller lexis than modern English and took this type of vocabulary construction to an extreme. A shield was a war-board, the sea was the whale-road and a body was a bone-house. Modern German also has a strong tendency to create self-explaining compounds rather than borrow words from other languages.

The ability to form word associations like these is one linguistic feature that allows for creativity or playfulness in language. For example:

Credit crunch Christmas

Below, you will find 10 sentences about the blue whale. Unfortunately, the words are mixed up. Can you put them in the correct order? (You will probably need a pen and a piece of paper for this).

Number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four (in this case, the word ‘as‘ must be used twice):

Number five:

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight (in this case, the word ‘the‘ must be used twice):

Number nine:

Number ten:

Check your answers by listening to the following clip:

This activity, which can be used to revise the language from this TEFLclips lesson plan, can be downloaded as a pdf file here: blue-whale-jumbled-sentences.pdf

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These word images were created with Wordle.net. In a previous posting, I wrote about how this application can be used to create Word Clouds of jokes, articles, song lyrics, etc (see posting here). But here we see that it is also excellent for jumbling up the words in short texts such as individual sentences, lines from songs, quotations, phrases, slogans or questions:

(This question is taken from a true and false game that you can play with your students - see here).

One disadvantage: As can be seen from blue whale facts 4 and 8 above (”Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant” and “It is one of the fastest animals in the sea“), when a word is repeated in the text, it will not be repeated in the Wordle image.

Wordle.net is an online tool which is used to create Word Clouds. Here is an example of a word cloud:

This Word Cloud was made using the ‘monkey keeps stealing my peanuts‘ joke. Note that the more a word appears in the text, the bigger it will be in the cloud. In the joke, for example, the word ‘monkey‘ appears five times, ‘player‘ appears three times, and ‘tell‘ appears once. Function words such as articles and prepositions are omitted.

Here is how to make a word cloud:

1. Copy a text of your choice
2. Go to Wordle.net
3. Click on ‘Create‘
4. Look for the box which says: ‘Paste in a bunch of text‘
5. Paste your text into this box
6. Click ‘Go‘
7. Use the options above the Word Cloud to make changes to colour, font and layout
8. Make a print of your Word Cloud

The above word cloud could be used to reactivate the monkey joke. Show it to students, ask them to identify the text (When did they see it? What was it about? Etc). Finally, give out copies of the Word Cloud and ask students to use it to reconstruct the joke.

Some other ideas:

• Use the lyrics of a song to make a Word Cloud and give copies to your students. They can then use it to write out the lyrics in full after listening.
• Make word clouds of news stories and ask students to predict what they are about before seeing the full text.

English grammar books tell us that in cases when a defining relative clause is the subject, the relative pronoun can be omitted. This potentially confusing point is best demonstrated by the following song:

“You’re the one that I want” (relative pronoun present)
“You are the one I want” (relative pronoun absent)

Last week, I wrote a posting about misunderstandings that can occur when a word’s part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc) is misidentified.

It occured to me that ‘parser breakdowns’ don’t just occur at the individual word level. In the following joke, a misunderstanding occurs as a result of a missing relative pronoun.

A man goes into a piano bar and orders a beer and a packet of peanuts. He takes a sip of his beer and is just about to open his peanuts when a monkey snatches them from his hand and runs into the corner to eat them.

The man is a bit unhappy but decides to forget about it. He orders another packet of peanuts and is just about open them when the same thing happens - the monkey snatches them from his hand and runs into the corner to eat them.

The man is now very angry and decides to complain. He shouts to the waitress, “Excuse me. Your monkey keeps stealing my peanuts.”

“It’s not my monkey,” she says. “It belongs to the piano player. Go and tell him.”

The customer goes over to the piano player and says, “Excuse me. Do you know your monkey keeps stealing my peanuts?”

The piano player replies, “No but if you can sing the first few lines, I might recognise it.”