Can we use the phrase "good recovering day"? Is it grammatically correct? Can it be used to be understood by a wider audience? [closed]
I'm having a minor surgery and I need to postpone a session with one of my clients from France. She wrote to me this sentence: "I wish you a good recovering Saturday". I certainly think this is not idiomatic, but I still want to check the grammatical correctness of this sentence and the associated phrases, below.
I'm aware that we can use the phrase 'recovery day', but I've the following questions:
- Can we use 'recovering day' to mean 'day of recovery' or 'recovery day'?
- Can we use 'recovery Sunday' ... is it grammatically correct?
- Can we use 'good recovering day' grammatically (if not idiomatically)? Or should we rather use 'good recovery Sunday', if the answer to 2) was a yes? The point here is putting two adjectives together: 'good' and 'recovery'. I know two adjectives can coexist, but is it okay to use like that?
Thanks in advance!
Solution 1:
The short answer is "I wish you a good recovering Saturday" is garbage and completely non-idiomatic.
The long answer is that the "-ing" form as a participle adjective has the adjectival effect of "that which verbs" and as a gerund has the effect of "associated with".
Thus
1 As a participle adjective: A "marking tool" is a tool that marks something, and a "cutting edge" is an edge that cuts.
2 As a gerund: A "walking stick" is not a stick that walks - it is something associated with walking and a "parking bay" is not a bay that parks but a bay associated with parking.
The question now is "how will "recovering Saturday" be understood?" It so happens that "recovering" will be understood as a participle rather than a gerund - A Saturday that recovers". This is because native speakers would expect you to use the deverbal noun "recovery" rather than the gerund "recovering" because there are also other noun compounds with "recovery in them: Recovery craft, recovery operation, etc.
I still want to check the grammatical correctness of this sentence.
Either this is (i) a pointless exercise as the phrase is not idiomatic, should never be used, and will be misunderstood, or (ii) you have misunderstood the word "grammatical".
Famously "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously)