Homework 1 error correction
“Feel” is not the verb of “touching,” but merely indicates how I am, i.e., my state. And therefore, it should be “I feel good.
New Ox thinks “well” can function as an adjective when it’s a complement (that’s what I think “[predicative]” means):
adjective (better, best) [predicative]
1 in good health; free or recovered from illness: I don’t feel very well
“Vacation” is not an adjective. “Vacation dissatisfaction” does not communicate anything, except if you guess that he means “dissatisfaction with your vacation.”
I don’t agree. That would mean “baseball hat” isn’t grammatical because “baseball” isn’t an adjective. Should we start writing “hat of baseball,” or “hat for baseball”?
New Ox on “baseball”:
[as modifier] : a baseball player.
I think we can solve it by saying that “baseball” and “vacation” are appositives. Maybe those don’t meet the qualification of being an appositive but I don’t know yet. (later: I still don’t know they aren’t just considered appositives)
you commit an essential violation of the nature of language because you’re putting two substantives together.
Now, generally speaking, an appositive is defined as “a substantive directly following a substantive and used to elaborate or explain it.”
I could see how “noun pileup” would be bad if it’s done excessively. like lots of nouns without breaks could pileup in your mind and make it hard to think. But I think “mathematics students” and “philosophy principles” are fine.
This might be a thing that changed since Peikoff’s time. Maybe “vacation home” wasn’t considered grammatically correct back then. I think it’s now.
While reading I see that Peikoff would probably agree that “vacation home” and “baseball hat” are okay:
Fowler recognizes that, so he cannot make a rule that two nouns together are always wrong. Fowler writes: “There is nothing new in putting a noun to this use,” that is, adjective use, “when no convenient adjective is available. Examples abound in everyday speech. ‘Government department,’
Why, for instance, should we speak of an ‘enemy attack,’ when we have the adjective ‘hostile’? Or a ‘luxury hotel,’ when we have the adjective ‘luxurious’? Or a ‘novelty number,’ when we have the adjective ‘novel’?
I agree with that. Use proper adjectives instead of nouns when you can.
“Nursery school” is legitimate, but what about “nursery school provision”? That’s a three-parter. And as he puts it, this is an ugly and obscure way of saying “provision of nursery school.”
Three-parters feels awkward. I can see that with “advance recreation planning,” it felt unusual but I couldn’t really say it was a mistake because I thought noun pileup was okay.
What about “a large vehicle fleet”? That is really typical of the noun pileup, “large” being an adjective, and then “vehicle fleet.” That is intrinsically ambiguous, because it could mean “a fleet of large vehicles,” or “a large fleet of vehicles.” A typical way that people write today and commit this error is to stick two nouns together with some kind of adjective, and it becomes impossible to know to which element in the pileup the adjective applies.
That’s definitely ambiguous writing! OK, so avoid noun pileups when possible, especially when you’re using adjectives on one of the nouns.
But the noun adjective, useful in its proper place, is now running riot and corrupting the language,” which is a modest statement if you read what comes out of modern psychology or modern educators.
Noun pileup seems more normalized now, so it probably didn’t stand out to me as much it would have for Peikoff. I definitely felt it on “bank rate rise leak probe,” but the others didn’t seem that bad. Only the three-parter “advance recreation planning” felt off to me, “vacation dissatisfaction” a bit as well.
58 minutes.