how to know it's time to stop writing for the day

We have seen, as I mentioned a day (or so?) ago, that my supervisor took one look at the sentence There must be some other factor determining whether a sequence of two nouns is a compound or a phrase; conversely, if stress is a reliable indicator of anything, it must be of something else, underlined the second clause, and wrote, 'That sentence should be taken outside & shot.'

In brief, the traditional wisdom is that in a sequence of two nouns, if the first noun is stressed the sequence is a compound and if the second noun is stressed the sequence is a phrase.  I'm setting out to show how the traditional wisdom is not actually so wise.  To that end, I have a huge list of two-noun sequences that have been marked by someone other than myself for left or right stress.  There are a few hundred words that take stress whether they appear first or second in the sequence, and one might conclude that these words are particularly stress-attracting (supervisor's comment:  'Right.'); but two-thirds of these also appear in unstressed positions, so wtf?  Maybe the words they combine with when they're unstressed are more stress-attracting -- fine, but sometimes these two-thirds of a couple hundred words combine with each other.  The word 'campaign', for instance, shows up in all four available positions (left side of left-stressed, left side of right-stressed, right side of left-stressed, right side of right-stressed), and so does the word 'education'.  So in 'education campaign', which one 'wins'?  It's like M&M battles.  This is all the background you should need for the following observation:

Something makes me suspect that if I were to hand in a draft with the sentence Is it possible to arrange the words on either side of the various compounds on some sort of sliding scale of stress-gravity?, my supervisor would have not just the sentence but also me taken outside and shot.

Word count, by the way:  6180, of NTE 25000, but I haven't even really begun talking about what I did yet.  Also, about 23,000 words worth of appendices, and counting, if it turns out to be a good idea to -- you know -- include some data.

Also:  weight regained while at the Worlds has been relost.  It took 48 hours, meaning, water water water.  Now I'm back where I was before I left.  Huzzah.

JACKPOT

So some words are more stress-attracting than others, is it?  And some of these words that attract stress no matter which side of the compound they're on, they can get trumped by 'stronger' words in some cases and show up without stress?

I've just found, in the same list, business investment and investment business.  Where I come from, we call that a minimal pair.  Thank you for playing:  there is no spectrum of stress-gravity (or, as I chose to call it in the revised version of the sentence, 'likelihood to attract stress').  YAY, I can move on to the next section now.

what decade is this again?

Friend M from college is here for a couple of days, up from London where she's been visiting her sister.  I bailed on breakfast this morning, in order to work on the thesis, but we agreed to meet for dinner, and I was the first one to get to the restaurant, so I'm standing outside waiting for her, and a guy passes by me and sort of does a double-take.  Sometimes people catch your eye and say hi, so I nod politely, and he looks at me even more curiously, and then calls me hesitantly by name.

him:  ... [?]
me:  ... excuse me?
him:  Is your name [full name]?
me:  ... Yes.

One of those, you know, where I'm like, okay, American accent, but around here there are tons of American accents, and how does this random person know my name?

Yeah, turns out he was a year behind me at my high school.

Which, once he said his name and the name of the school, I realized, of course I know that name, and of course I know that face.  But I'd never in a thousand years have recognized him just from passing by on the street (which, you may remember, a couple of years ago I did recognize a kid who had been four years behind me at the same school, although that was on a long bus trip and a series of freshers' week events since his wife was in my college).  Freakiness, man.  I am choosing to focus on, Hey, I'm pushing 30 (okay, I'm pushing 29), but people recognize me (and remember my name?!) who I haven't seen since I was 17.  Rock on.

[hesitant smile]