Ha! This one’s not really a problem. As puns go, it’s a good one.
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But a lot of illiterates won’t even notice—or might be misled by—the spelling on the wall. The word nightstand is a closed-compound noun—not night stand (open compound) or night-stand (hyphenated compound). A nightstand is a piece of furniture.
The pun, though, is with the expression one-night stand, when you bang someone and then leave, with no attachments and, we hope, no regrets. Notice, though, how the expression one-night stand is a noun phrase with a phrasal adjective (also called a compound adjective) in front.
a nightstand = a piece of furniture
a one-night stand = a stand (a bang) that’s for one night only
Be sure not to confuse one with the other.
When I left my high school teaching job in the early 90s, some of my students got together and wrote me a card that they all signed. I was surprised and didn’t think they had it in them: they had struck me as utterly self-absorbed all year long. Anyway, one girl had jokingly written about how she had “black male photos” of me, which was inadvertently hilarious. That’s an example of what happens when you don’t understand the difference between a compound adjective (black male) and a compound word serving as an adjective (blackmail), or it’s an example of just not knowing the proper vocabulary (blackmail isn’t spelled “black male”).
Trivia: the expression one-night stand apparently originates in 1800s theater. It meant a traveling troupe was in town to give a performance only for a single night before moving on again.


