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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

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SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
having “a” before “child” is the only way I can interpret the sentence wrong in that way, even without the hyphen

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PapaStevesy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
“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 🤷‍♂️

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- Vincentmario@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  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.
  
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