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Headline is:

"The streaming platform executive says he — and the company he helped build — will survive a bout of bad earnings numbers."

My question is should I read it like:

1 - bout of [ bad earnings ] ( numbers )

or

2 - bout of bad ( earnings numbers )

ColleenV
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Dagaggio lera
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    What difference does it make? – FumbleFingers May 29 '22 at 11:10
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    '2' is more likely. Every publicly-traded corporation reports on its finances four times a year. These reports could be informally called “earnings numbers”; I cannot say if I have in fact heard that phrase before, but it would be understood. And sometimes the report is bad news, or bad numbers. – Anton Sherwood Jun 01 '22 at 04:41
  • This is a full sentence—I wouldn't call it a headline. – nschneid Jun 01 '23 at 13:38

1 Answers1

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The first reading is the only one that's grammatical.

If the author intended the second, in which case the earnings numbers would be only some of the bad, they would need more words, or more punctuation. Even then the sentence would sound odd.

Ethan Bolker
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    Could you please explain further? I don't understand what you could mean by "be only some of the bad". – Dan Getz May 28 '22 at 21:42
  • "A bout of bad" could be an ungrammatical slang-like way to say "Many bad things", Then presumably poor earnings would be among them. – Ethan Bolker May 28 '22 at 21:49
  • No - unqualified "a bout of bad" could only mean the speaker isn't a native Anglophone. It's irrelevant to bring that up in the context of parsing OP's text. – FumbleFingers May 29 '22 at 11:11
  • @FumbleFingers You're right. I think someone could say that on purpose to make a point in conversation, but that interpretation doesn't really help an English language learner. – Ethan Bolker May 29 '22 at 12:45
  • I'm actually quite surprised to consciously recognise that almost no native Anglophone ever uses the word *bad* as a noun, considering how easily we nounify verbs and verbify nouns in general. The only actual definition in the full OED for *bad* as a noun is obsolete (it once meant a cat - domestic or wild). But maybe modern apologetic *My bad!* counts as a noun use, I dunno. – FumbleFingers May 29 '22 at 15:04
  • @FumbleFingers You might have said "noun verbs and verb nouns" rather than adding the "-ify". This question deals with nouning an adjective. – Ethan Bolker May 29 '22 at 15:26
  • Another surprising discovery! Until reading your comment and checking things out with Google Books / NGrams, I would have guessed that we're more likely to refer to *verbifying nouns / nounifying verbs. But I see now that ify-ing* is far less common than plain *-ing* in this context. You learn something new every day! I'm not keen on *verbicise* though, which I found a couple of instances of. – FumbleFingers May 29 '22 at 15:37