Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.
—Nick Caraway
Ian Parker, writing about George Clooney in the April 14 issue of The New Yorker, startled me by saying that when a star enables a film to be green-lit, he is a god feigning mortality for the duration of the shoot.
Setting aside any theological questions that might suggest themselves, the image this assertion called to mind was something like this:
![[a still from a green-lit movie starring George Clooney]](https://pics.livejournal.com/q_pheevr/pic/0006qtsy/s320x320)
In my grammar, anyway, if a film is green-lit, then someone was shining an actual green light on the set, whereas if it has been given the metaphorical green light, the go-ahead, it has been green-lighted.
![[the proverbial green light]](https://pics.livejournal.com/q_pheevr/pic/0006x02a){kind=small}
This is part of a more general pattern in English word structure that arises from the interaction of a couple of phenomena:
- It's very easy, in English, to coin a new word simply by converting an existing word from one part of speech to another. (This is the process famously exemplified and alluded to by the Calvinist dictum "Verbing weirds language," except of course that it's not just verbing—you can noun things, too, as in the case of turning the phrasal verb go ahead into the noun go-ahead.)
- New words use the regular inflectional affixes to mark things like tense and number, unless they are directly and transparently derived from irregular words.
So, if you take a noun and verb it, it becomes a regular verb, even if it looks like an already existing irregular verb:
- If a baseball player hits a ball that is caught on the fly by a member of the opposing team, then the batter has flied out, not flown out.
- A politician who has been playing to the grandstand is said to have grandstanded, not to have grandstood.
- A plane that went into a dive either dived or dove, but if it went into a nosedive, then it nosedived; one wouldn't say that it nosedove.
Similarly, when a compound noun contains an irregular noun, the compound as a whole will not be irregular unless that noun is the head of the compound:
![[Toronto Maple Leafs]](https://pics.livejournal.com/q_pheevr/pic/0006tp6z)
- A wisdom tooth is a kind of tooth, so the plural is wisdom teeth, but a sabretooth isn't, so the plural of that is sabretooths.
- If you have more than one maple leaf of the sort that grow on maple trees, then you have some maple leaves, but if you have more than one Maple Leaf of the sort that haven't won the Stanley Cup since 1967, then you have some Maple Leafs.
So if you take the compound noun green light and convert it into the verb green-light, then it will have the structure shown below, and the fact that the verb light has an irregular past tense will be quite irrelevant to how you form the past tense of green-light.
![[V [N [A green] [N light]]]](https://pics.livejournal.com/q_pheevr/pic/0006wrxc)
What I wonder, though, is whether Ian Parker's grammar actually works differently from this, or whether the appearance of green-lit in the article was some kind of hypercorrection. I'm reminded of the story of the zookeeper who couldn't decide whether to order "two mongooses" or "two mongeese"—neither looked right—and thus ended up asking for "one mongoose, and, while you're at it, another one." But The New Yorker, rather uncharacteristically, appears to have come down on the side of mongeese.
