Monday, 30 November 2015

Lazy to do laundry

This advert appeared in my workplace recently:


It offers laundry services under the line 'Lazy to do Laundry?'. This is not quite felicitous for me (that's linguist-speak for 'there's something not quite right about the syntax'). Of course I can understand what it means: it doesn't seem to me to be any different from 'Too lazy to do laundry?' or 'Lazy when it comes to doing your laundry?', and that's obviously the intended meaning.

I can't find any more examples like it: Google, CoCA and the British National Corpus all have the string 'lazy to+infinitive' preceded by 'too'. Normally, adjective+to+infinitive means 'To [infinitive] is [adjective]', as in 'It's lazy to sleep all day', and indeed there was one example of this in CoCA.

[Update] My friend Stuart pointed out that there are some examples on Twitter. Interesting in itself that they are there but not on Google: They must be rare enough that they're drowned out by the 'to lazy to' examples.

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