What is a person place or thing?

If you think that this month's Lounge has something to do with nouns, you're right.When a speaker characterized a situation as "a Kumbaya thing" on the radio a few weeks ago, we dug up data on these very three nouns.Huh?What is a Kumbaya thing?

We'll return to that a bit later, but the interesting subject that this lexical artifact illuminates for us is the way that speakers modify these three generic and extremely common nouns by dropping another word in front of them.

You could say that's where the adjectives belong.When we use another word to modify a word, it's likely because no other word would do the job.The sleight-of-word is carried off with ease.The most common person companions show that the shorthand accomplished by the construction can be expanded in a variety of ways.

A person on television is a person with a cat and a computer.

"I'm not a crab person" is a subclass of this construction, in which the attributive spot is filled by the name of a food or dish.

There are two categories of attributive nouns: gerunds and other.The gerund + place construction expands to the place where someone or people are.Meeting place, gathering place and hiding place are some of the most common compounds.If the attributive noun is not a gerund, a likely filler is a consumables place, where the translation is steak/fish/ice cream/barbecue place.

Thing is not easy to pin down.Any among its many glosses in the VT.The semantic expansion of these phrases is a grab bag.How would you define the most common thing pairs?

The guy thing is team, age, girl, family, boy, confidence, nostalgia, ego, love, thing.

You have to shoot in the dark without context.Many of these compounds turn out to be polysemous.What is a guy thing: behavior, situation, or personality trait?Depending on the context, it can be any of these.

Without some context, native speakers would conclude that the meaning is not clear, even with context.Consider the sentences that were pulled out.