Comment on You okay babe?
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoNo I’m not, I’m interpreting it as the object of the preposition by. The lack of hyphenation means that child is either a noun which is eating pedophiles or an adjective describing pedophiles who are eating. Presumably neither is what the author intended.
It says “stolen by child eating pedophiles”. The preposition “by” takes a noun phrase as its object.That noun phrase is “child eating pedophiles”. The head noun is clearly pedophiles. “child eating” is a modifier (a compound/participle phrase) describing those pedophiles
Hyphenation would make it clearer, but its absence doesn’t suddenly create a new valid reading where “child” becomes a separate noun or the main object
Gamer and yeah
having “a” before “child” is the only way I can interpret the sentence wrong in that way, even without the hyphen
“Child eating” is not a compound modifier, that’s what the hyphen does. Without a hyphen, the modifiers “child” and “eating” both independently describe “pedophiles”, the hyphen makes “child-eating” into the compound adjective the author was obviously intending to convey. Wikipedia uses the example “heavy-metal detector”. Without the hyphen, you have a metal detector that’s heavy. If you need a device to detect heavy-metals, your SOL.
Absolutely no clue what “gamer and yeah” means 🤷♂️
Hyphens clarify compounds, they don’t create them. Grammatically, ‘child eating’ modifies ‘pedophiles’, the head noun. Reading ‘child’ as its own noun would require ‘a child’ or a different construction, which isn’t what’s written.
Hyphens clarify compounds
Exactly, they clarify multi-word compound adjectives from multi-word non-compound adjectives. Only multi-word compound adjectives in everyday, common use can get away with forgoing the hyphen without creating the kind of confusion exemplified perfectly by the comments above. “Child-eating” is obviously not in everyday, common usage, and thus should be hyphenated.
Reading ‘child’ as its own noun would require ‘a child’ or a different construction, which isn’t what’s written.
I’m not reading it as its own noun, I’m reading it as a noun adjunct, describing pedophiles. If the pedophiles are children, they’re child pedophiles. If those child pedophiles are eating… Sure it should have a comma, but lord knows no one on the Internet knows how to use them properly
None of this really matters because it was all based on a shitreply to a doom post, who gives a shit?
Still don’t know what gamer and yeah has to do with anything, but you do you bud 😘
youcantreadthis@quokk.au 2 weeks ago
Wow you put a lot of work into explaining that when you could just ride the grammatical lightning and have fun with it
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wdym, I was having a blast