A couple of days ago, I saw the Olive Oil/Baby Oil meme resurfacing on Facebook. For those not familiar with it, it shows the image of a rather shocked looking baby with the caption If olive oil is made of olives, then… what is baby oil made of?
My heart goes out to the baby, because compound nouns in English can be very very tricky. There is no standard form for interpreting the meaning of a compound noun X-Y. In Olive Oil, the first refers to the source of the oil, while _Baby Oil _clearly isn’t produced by squeezing babies. Note that this is not something can be solved purely analytically. You need to use real world knowledge, or common sense, or intuition, or whatever to resolve the meaning. For instance, a bread knife isn’t made of bread, and a _steel knife _will probably not cut through steel. A steel cutter, though, is mostly something that can be used to cut steel. A kitchen knife, on the other hand, is neither made of a kitchen nor can it cut through one._ _It turns out that children find it pretty difficult to parse compound nouns and often go for a wrong meaning. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out for long what exactly cutting chaai meant (Thanks to Anasuya for this example). In fact, compound nouns, often with 4 to 5 nouns piled on top of each other, are regularly employed by newspapers to condense news matter into typical headlinese. It’s not uncommon to read headlines with noun stacks like Sarojini Nagar Midnight Murder Trial Verdict.