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rubber baby buggy bumper kinda bounce.
What???? [confused-e]
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Pooh-Bah
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rubber baby buggy bumper kinda bounce.
What???? [confused-e]
It's a tongue twister. I think I first heard it in a Warner Brother's cartoon or a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode. It's a good example of the ambiguity of compunds: e.g., "ancient history teacher" is it the teacher that is ancient or the history? I assume the compound breaks down as
[rubber [[baby buggy] bumpers]]
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Hyphens almost always resolve the ambiguity.
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Hyphens almost always resolve the ambiguity.But that would be wrong. Ancient History, the noun and discipline, is not hyphenated, not even when it qualifies another noun. You might argue that you should use a comma in the less flattering case: the ancient, history teacher. And you could always arrange the constituent words differently, e.g., the rubber bumpers on that baby buggy, but that ruins the effect. And besides, when speaking nobody can hear your hyphens. You could use pauses. Less commas than ellipses.  But seriously, ambiguity of this kind runs rampant throughout language. If it's not obvious from the context, restatement and rearrangement usually fix things.
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"Carelessness, or perhaps a laudable desire to economize in hyphens, sometimes leads to the omission of one where it is manifestly a case of all or none. ... Some pretty problems in hyphening are set by the unpleasant modern habit of forgetting the existence of prepositions and using a long string of words as a sort of adjectival sea serpent... Those who like writing in this way can be left to solve their problems for themselves. Indeed, many of our difficulties with hyphens are of our own making; we can avoid them by remembering prepositions ..."
H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage, 2d ed., Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 257.
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Oy, where would you stick a hyphen in either of the two phrases I used in this thread to illustrate ambiguity? For your convenience, here they are again:
rubber baby buggy bumpers
ancient history teacher
I say only a misguided hyperhyphenated prescriptivist would insist on hyphens in either of these two noun phrases. And he would be wrong, too. BTW, one of the prhases is from Saroyan's Human Comedy and the other is a near-folk saying.
And if you're going to quote Fowler's chapter and verse, at least be kind enough to use the first & preferred edition.
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rubber baby-buggy bumpers ancient-history teacher but Ancient History teacher See AHD usage panel on compound adjectives: http://www.bartleby.com/64/84.html
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But AnnaStrophic, what does "rubber baby-buggy bumpers" mean? a rubber bumper on a baby buggy or the bumper of a rubber baby buggy made And neither of your ancient history teacher phrases means a history teacher who is ancient. 
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