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Bird watching. Noun (archaic). A form of harmless staring, conducted in woody areas, by genial eccentrics often named Matilda or Chauncey...
...HOMELESS" IS an adjective, not a noun. Insistence on this point is not merely a case of the galloping semantics, because the way people use this ugly euphemism reveals some ugly attitudes. We read that a shelter has beds for "20 homeless." At least "three homeless" died in Cambridge this winter. Bureaucrats discuss "the homeless problem" and patiently explain why it is somebody else...
...Game is capitalized as a proper noun because it is very, very proper. It is like The Country Club: everybody who matters knows that it is in Brookline. Most of these same people know that The Game is The Game...
Many sociologists have speculated (widely, of course) about the love affair between journalese-users and hyphenated modifiers. The gist of all this cerebration seems to be that readers cannot stand the shock of an unmodified noun, at least on first reference. Thus we have Libyan-sponsored terrorism, Ping-Pong diplomacy, debt-laden Brazil and the two most popular hyphenated modifiers of the 1980s, "financially-troubled" and "financially-plagued," which can fairly be used to describe most Latin American nations, many banks and the United States Football League. The Syrian-backed P.L.O., an earlier hyphenated champion, had to be retired when...
Such verbal interplay is made possible by a parser, the part of the computer program that interprets players' commands. The first adventure-style programs contained parsers capable only of responding to simple noun-verb combinations such as Go north, Take sword, or Kill troll. In the late 1970s, however, Marc Blank, who is now a vice president at Infocom, and a colleague at M.I.T.'s lab for computer science, devised more sophisticated parsers with the aid of an artificialintelligence language called MDL (pronounced mud-dle). Then, in 1979, Blank and newly formed Infocom released Zork I, the first...