Back-To-Back Nouns [duplicate]

Back-to-back nouns occur for different reasons. These include:

(1) Nouns that are open compounds, such as shoe tree, gentleman caller, monkey wrench, snow day, pipe dream, and acid drop. These can be found in dictionaries and have fixed meanings that are not always readily deduced from the meanings of the constituent nouns.

(2) Nouns used attributively before another noun, where they function as modifiers, such as a stone lion, lion costume, strawberry jam, and printer glitch. You still need to figure out the connection: a lion made of stone, a costume that looks like a lion, jam made from strawberries, and a glitch involving the printer.

Noun-noun chains can build up. "I'm printing the strawberry jam labels now." Here "strawberry jam" is being used attributively as if it were a one-word modifier. In the right circumstances, we could easily understand "I left the pen on the strawberry jam label carton."

(3) Newspapers often take liberties by piling up attributive-type noun clusters to save space in headlines: "Consumer Loan Bill Vote Delayed" or even "Consumer Loan Bill Vote Delay" Here the noun chain does form a unit of meaning (sometimes an entire sentence), but these can present readers with a parsing puzzle that requires unfolding the noun chain, supplying the missing words, and reconstructing the intended syntax: "There has been a Delay in the Vote on the Bill concerning Consumer Loans.

(4) Noun-nouns occurring because they just happen to be adjacent for reasons of syntax. They do not form a single two-word unit of meaning:

"He was the type of student colleges would be thrilled to have." ("He was the type of student [that] colleges would be thrilled to have.")

"In the summer boys turn to sports." (Here "summer" ends an adverbial phrase.)

"Don't take to heart names he calls you when he's drunk." ("Take to heart" being an idiom for "feel hurt by" or "take seriously")

(Many years ago, living in Italy, I had to translate the name of a kitchen appliance that I was not familiar with--a new (for me at least) kitchen appliance, a centrifuga scolaverdure (literally a "centrifuge [for] draining vegetables"). I was fairly certain that the English name for something in a kitchen wouldn't involve the word centrifuge, but I nonetheless had to smile when I learned we call it a salad spinner.)