• PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
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    12 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 🤷‍♂️

    • Vincentmario@feddit.uk
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      10 hours 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.

      • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        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 😘