Originally Posted By: Zed
as a noun??
as in "It is a hypothetical."?
erk


What have you lot got against synecdoche? The noun is obviously implicit here, and can be understood from context. One of my favourite examples of this sort of thing comes from Hindi, where the phrase "main hoon na" does not carry its apparent literal meaning of "I am not", but means "I'm here (for you)", being a contraction of something like "main yahaan hoon, na? (I'm here, aren't I?)" Similarly with "It's a hypothetical". The expanded meaning is obvious, and in time, the currently implicit noun will no doubt be built in to the definition of "hypothetical".