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Chris -- 2018-04-11
as in “That new novel is really a page burner.” Though googling nets the definition of a page turner as “an exciting, interesting, or suspenseful book”, such a book might indeed be sizzling.
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Maggie: The Language Log describes “page burner” as an Idiom blend of “page turner” and “barn burner.” See below link/blurb for details.
Google Counts on Sept 19, 2006
2,920,000 “page turner”
11,800 “page BURNER”
Language Log: The way the cookie bouncesNeal Whitman at Literal Minded points out that “page-burner” is not a typical old-fashioned malapropism, since it doesn’t involve simple subsitution of one …
itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001737.html – 11k – Cached – Similar pages
Quoting the above website:
Neal Whitman at Literal Minded points out that “page-burner” is not a typical old-fashioned malapropism, since it doesn’t involve simple subsitution of one word for another. Instead, there’s a sort of exchange of parts between two similar phrases, “barn burner” and “page turner”, where “A B-er” and “C D-er” are hybridized to form “C B-er” (and perhaps “A D-er”).
This exchange process has been studied experimentally by J. Cooper Cutting and Kay Bock, who used the naturally evocative term idiom blend rather than malapropism in referring to it: “That’s the way the cookie bounces: syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blends”, Mem Cognit. 1997 Jan;25(1):57-71. Neal cites a 1/2004 post by Justin Busch at Semantic Compositions, asking for the right terminology for similar cases, and (independently of Cutting and Bock) Neal suggests the term idiom blending.
Example of “page burner” on the web…
Meanderings – Bravenet Web JournalRandom House unabridged dictionary says time is “the system of those sequential … Our lives can become a page-burner kind of novel in the hands of God. ...
mickeyanders.bravejournal.com/index.php – 57k – Cached – Similar pag
Last edited by jorkel (2006-09-19 11:11:42)
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