Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and in the last episode, we talked about noun phrases. A commonly misused noun phrase is the wonderful idiom, “fever pitch.”
Most people think the correct phrase is “fevered pitch.” “Fevered” is an adjective, so technically it makes sense that it would come before the noun, “pitch.” But the original form of the idiom is “fever pitch,” and it works because nouns can sometimes modify other nouns, just like adjectives modify nouns. Consider phrases like “coffee table.” Obviously, “coffee” is a noun, but here it’s modifying “table.”
When a noun modifies another noun, it’s either called an attributive noun—meaning a noun that describes an attribute of another noun—or a noun adjunct. Unlike normal adjectives, you can’t say “very coffee table” to imply that something is extremely coffee in nature.
Again, this is deep in the weeds of English grammar, and you’ve probably been using it correctly for a while without knowing it. But sometimes it’s good to know the “why” behind the “how.”
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