Noncompositional

Today the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute began at good old Leland Stanford Junior University (”graduate program language requirement” or “exotic foreign language requirement”?). In order to register laptops with university tech services (so as to be able to connect wirelessly to their high-tech but sometimes-sluggish network) some machines have to run Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool. I think I hardly could have been the first linguist at the institute to notice the hilarity of the name of this little tool (and certainly not the first in the history of the department — and I’m sure many non-linguists will also see where I’m going with this).

Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite: chunking/modifier-attachment ambiguity. Is it, as I suspect, a Tool for Removing Malicious Software? Or is it, more hilariously, a Malicious Tool that Removes all sorts of Software?