HIGHking

Think of a given noun phrase, such as high king, meaning “a king that is high”. Naturally, being a noun phrase consisting of the adjective high and the noun king (which is the head of the noun phrase), this second element must be pronounced more prominently than the adjective. However, we can imagine a scenario, where someone is deliberately attempting to highlight the fact that this king is actually high, as in the contrastive stress when correcting someone. To illustrate, considering the following conversation between two people: A: Are you talking about the wise king? B: No, no. Actually, I am talking about the HIGH king. Now imagine we were to coin a term to describe a hobby, which involves getting high on marijuana, and then going for a hike while enjoying music through headphones. What figure of speech or pun would best describe this activity? “I went HIGHking”. Whether heard or read, what comes to perception can be linguistically two-fold: 1. the classic interpretation of going hiking and 2. this is a somewhat less intuitive, yet linguistically acceptable interpretation lent from the collocation “go + adjective” or in this case “go + noun”. After all, there are natural phrases like “go crazy”, “go mad”, “go from happy to sad”, or in this case “go HIGHking”. So the interpretation that one might allow for with a bit of stretching one’s imagination would be going into a state of euphoria so pleasant that one feels like a king without being one.