"Red, White, and Blueland"

Language Log 2025-02-13

Last Monday, Rep. Earl L. "Buddy" Carter introduced H.R.1161 – "Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025", according to which (Sec. 2)

The President is authorized to enter into negotiations with the Government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland.

and (Sec. 3)

(a) Renaming.—Greenland shall be known as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

(b) References.—Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to Greenland shall be deemed to be a reference to “Red, White, and Blueland”.

The bill's current entry on govtrack.us lists its status as

This bill is in the first stage of the legislative process. It was introduced into Congress on February 10, 2025. It will typically be considered by committee next before it is possibly sent on to the House or Senate as a whole.

…and estimates its prognosis for final passage as 4%.

The proposed name connects with a couple of interesting aspects of English morphology. First, there's the use of a phrasal prenominal modifier — "Red, White, and Blue" instead of "Green". This is entirely normal, as discussed on p. 156 of "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English":

But second, there's the fact that -land is written solid with Blue (as with Green). In the case of Greenland, land is not really a (fully) separate noun, as indicated by the fact that its vowel is reduced to [ə] rather than being fully pronounced as [æ]. The same thing is true of -land in  Newfoundland.

But even though land is also written solid with the preceding item in Neverland, it's not reduced in that case, as the audio given by Wiktionary testifies.  I'm guessing that Rep. Carter intends the -land part of "Red, White, and Blueland" to be unreduced as well, and that others will follow, though only time will tell.

[See also "Måke Califørnia Great Ægain"…]