The English language has the odd habit of shortening adjective-noun phrases
by omitting the noun.  Vacuum (cleaner).  Microwave (oven).  Summit (meeting).
For the benefit of our visitors from other languages, or just for fun, please
list more of these shortened phrases.

26 responses total.

iwbg iwbg

(people like you are why I left academia)

Sometimes it goes the other way.  (Phonograph) record.

Those aren't adjective-noun phrases, they're noun-noun phrases (as is gull's
example).
 
I'm more interested by the phenomenon that there are only a few natural
two-syllable words ending in -o (lotto, bingo), but a huge number of clipped
words ending in -o (photo, porno, psycho, sado, pseudo, zoo), as well as a
few slang words (wacko, weirdo, dumbo). 
*shrug* Or maybe not. =}

This response has been erased.

stupid (fucker)

        Oral (roberts)

mother(fucker), too

retro (retroactive, retrospective?)  art deco(ratif?)  auto(mobile)
The phrases made from two nouns are using the first one as an adjective.
Television (receiver).  Radio (apparatus).  

It's a specifier, not a descriptive.

Lotto is used as a shortform for lottery, is it not?

#11> 'spossible
 
#9> I disagree, they're noun + noun phrases. ;}

bull (shit)

grocery (store), laundry (? a place that washes it), final (exam) - definitely
an adjective, application (program) - any other truncated computer phrases?,
laptop (computer), desktop (?)

het (erosexual)

But, following my pattern: hetero and homo.

        Shortened words are different than dropped nouns, right?

Depends on your morphological theory... =>
If you classify things as morphological units based on their semantic
completeness, then no, a clipping and a dropped noun are roughly the same
thing, linguistically. Multiword phrases would qualify as single morphological
units.
If you classify things as morphological units based on their semantic
completeness AND their word count (i.e., all morphological units must be
smaller than or the same size as a word), then yes, they're different.
 
Most laymen tend to think in the latter terms, but the former is more
linguistically sound, IMHO.

        Jeez, who peed in your coffee this morning?

        I do believe there's a difference in that the dropped portion of a
clipping doesn't necessarily have the same role as the dropped portion of 
a dropped noun phrase.

Noun phrases can be much more complex than used here. See
http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/engl_126/ph_noun.htm

The type of noun phrase offered in #0 are those in which the head has
been dropped in favor of just the premodifier, and yet retaining the
same meaning. A lot of examples given later do not have this property.

In fact, there are many noun phrases in which dropping the head changes
the meaning entirely. For example, "paper tiger" cannot be shortened to
just "paper" and retain the same meaning. Other examples are phone book,
apple pie, and stone age. In all of these the modifier restricts the head
but still requires the head. In laundry room it does not, the modifier
alone coming into use for the phrase. 

It wasn't initially clear to me what the difference is between those in
which the head can be dropped and those in which it cannot.  I have now
concluded it is often because the examples in #0 are *redundancies*.  That
is, laundry originally meant the place where laundry was done, so laundry
room is redundant. Grocery store is the same: grocery came first and store
is redundant. "Radio" is an invented word and it is redundant to add
"apparatus". 

Final exam doesn't follow this, but here it is a case of clipping a phrase
that had a single meaning in a special environment - a school.  To a radio
engineer, however, a final is the last stage in an amplifier. The term
"final stage" is clipped to just "final".

In other noun phrases, the premodifier was introduced later to restrict
the head, as in apple pie. In this and other similar examples there is no
redundancy. 

John> What Rane said. ;} The point is, with clipping, the meaning isn't
obvious from the remnant, and is the result of conventional usage.
"Automobile" and "final exam" can both be clipped (to auto and final,
respectively), and both require some degree of context to be sure of the
meaning ("auto" *usually* means car, but "putting something on auto" would
mean "automatic," for instance).
 
And nobody peed in my coffee. I don't drink coffee. I hadn't meant to sound
harsh or annoyed, I certainly wasn't feeling that way.

        I understand your point, but do you mine?

        If there weren't a difference, would it be possible to reasonably
discuss whether or not the difference were significant?

I'll accept that there's a difference, I'm jus tnot sure how important it is.

(tele)phone but not (tele)vision or (tele)type.

Where does final exam[ination] fit in this scheme?

Off with its tail?  Like retro.

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